Huffington Post10 Times Ballet Dancers Made Pop Music Videos So Much Better February 18, 2015

Earlier this month, Irish singer-songwriter Hozier debuted his newest music video for the Grammy nominated ballad, “Take Me to Church.” The four-minute visual tease, directed by artist David LaChapelle, introduced ballet novices to Moscow-based dancer Sergei Polunin, a man who rebels against the dance establishment as much as he does standard laws of physics.

The highest praise for a dancer these days is to call her “an athlete.” What is wrong with “artist”? Why prolong the inferiority complex about art? Let’s get past that whole macho-athlete-branding thing. Take a look a this gorgeous dance by Sergei Polunin to Hozier’s “Take Me to Church,” directed by David LaChapelle:

LaChapelle directed the new visual interpretation of the Grammy-nominated hit, starring British Royal Ballet vet Polunin performing choreography by Jade Hale-Christofi. The emotive dancer, donning only nude tights and a cluster of tattoos, sautés, tombés and pirouettes through an illuminated empty space. The white room clashes with the dark energy of the bluesy song, making Polunin's stunning dance moves resemble some kind of spiritual possession.

From Basquiat in the buff to Sterling Ruby spray-paintings to Joan Mitchell masterpieces, this list of shows reflects the eclectic tastes of Artsy’s users. Based on traffic on Artsy over the past year, we’ve rounded up the top gallery shows of 2014.

“David LaChapelle: LAND SCAPE” at Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York

David LaChapelle’s fluorescent photographic investigations into the oil industry filled Paul Kasmin last January. “LAND SCAPE” debuted new works from two series, “Refineries” and “Gas Stations,” which were created from photographing scale models of filling stations and power plants that were constructed by hand from cardboard and disposable materials.

Daisy McCorgray enters the mind of surrealist photographer, DAVID LACHAPELLE, as he discusses the projects Landscape and Gas Stations, and why he left commercial fashion photography behind.

Pharrell, Michael Jackson. Michaelangelo: an absurd combination, perhaps, but these are the people inspiring David LaChapelle in 2014. Looking through the surreal images of iconic excess and grotesque in his expansive portfolio (many of which are familiar for their controversy as much as their style). I was unsure of what to expect as I dialled the Los Angeles number. Yet as the smooth drawl, verging on the hypnotic, travelled down the line, I was drawn into the LaChapelle stream of consciousness. And for the hour spent speaking with the Rene Magritte of the photography world, it all seemed to make perfect sense...

The TelegraphDavid LaChapelle and his new model Land Scape project October 4, 2014

These shining cathedrals of power are not what they seem. Modelled in miniature from plastic bottles, egg cartons and other waste material, they are the photographer David LaChapelle’s comment on our petroleum-reliant culture.

He was hailed by Richard Avedon as photography’s answer to René Magritte, and certainly David LaChapelle’s hyper-kitsch, neon-rinsed images reveal more than a touch of the surreal. His is a visionary and wholly artificial world, capable of seducing and confusing, often all at once.

LaChapelle, 51, secured his break in 1980 after patronage from Andy Warhol. He was handed a column in Warhol’s Interview magazine after the pair befriended each other at Studio 54.

One critic notes that LaChapelle blurs distinctions between photography and painting. The bounties of beauty, as codified by Renaissance artists, the Pre-Raphaelites and popular 19th-century illustrators, is here earnestly naked. Yet the nudity also signifies innocence cleansing, spirit. In fact, the body becomes a symbol for transfiguration between earth and spirit. Like the shakers or other late 19th century adherents of spiritual revival the figures here are never idle, though neither are they demonstrative. Within a naïve search for truth, they are actively engaged in discovery. Stripped of austerity they gracefully become a basic element. The subject becomes the alchemy of transformation.

Despite being criticized for being too commercial, offensively provocative and grotesque, David LaChapelle is an essential figure in photography, having been wildly successful working with the biggest names in the entertainment and fashion worlds, contributing his exuberant ideas, boundless creativity and distinctive style. Constructing decadent sets, he staged his models against baroque and delirious backdrops to produce visually-compelling images, each unique in their narrative and evocative content. He has the ability of making his subjects push their characters yet brings across his point with stereotypes associated with their image. He has depicted a turbaned Elizabeth Taylor looking like a $5 fortune-teller, Courtney Love as Virgin Mary, Lady Gaga wearing only screaming headlines, Michael Jackson as a misunderstood martyr, Angelina Jolie in various states of undress and Pamela Anderson baring all in a room plastered with her Playboy spreads. As one of the world’s most in-demand photographers and directors for advertising and publishing, LaChapelle’s imprint is everywhere, having set new standards for glamorous, celebrity portraiture.

Remember when VHS copies of Hellraiser were turning up on bus shelters? Cult American photographer David LaChapelle is at it too now. He's eschewed typical practice and opted to exhibit some of his latest work outside the confines of a gallery and where everyone can see them: the tops of bus shelters in the middle of London.

Ten photographs from his new show Land Scape are currently sitting pretty on bus stop roofs between Aldwych and Trafalgar Square. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between Annin Arts and Transport for London, which gave a similar platform to another iconic photographer, Juergen Teller, in February this year.

For Annin Arts director George Annin, selecting LaChapelle as the follow-up artist to Teller was a no-brainer. "LaChapelle is one of the most iconic photographers of our time," explained Annin. "His influence on popular culture is undeniable."

Time Out LondonCommuter culture: TfL brings top-drawer art to the top deck September 11, 2014

Yes, going to art exhibitions can be food for the mind and a treat for the eyes. But sometimes gallery visits can fall by the wayside when you’re busy with that little thing called life. But what if you could soak up some culture as you commute around the capital? Now we’re talking. In honour of London Fashion Week, from September 12-22 you’ll be able to check out photographs by legendary photographer David LaChapelle from the comfort of your seat on the upper deck when you cruise down the Strand.

Even though LaChapelle is known for his stylish snaps of celebs, this public exhibition features ten images from his ‘fine art collection’ so you’ll be treated to a selection of luminous landscapes made from everyday objects. This may be the only time you hope that there’s a change of drivers/fight/Oyster card fail on your bus to prolong your viewing time. Plus it’ll only cost you the price of a single journey. Or if you don’t want to pay the bus fare, just get a really tall ladder. Bargain.

BBC NewsDavid LaChapelle photography on top of London bus shelters September 11, 2014

Works by one of the world's most famous photographers have gone on display on the top of bus stops in central London. Images by David LaChapelle show glowing landscapes made from everyday objects such as hair rollers and tins cans. The photographer is famed for his work with pop artists including Michael Jackson, Britney Spears and Madonna.

The exhibition, which can be seen by people on the top deck of buses, is part of Transport for London's (TfL) celebration of the Year of The Bus. Landscapes runs from 12 - 22 September. The pictures are of handcrafted scale models which are constructed from such items as drinking straws. They can be seen on bus stops outside Somerset House on the Strand, Trafalgar Square and Aldwych. Leon Daniels, TfL's managing director of surface transport, said: "Public exhibitions are a great way of making art available to everyone."

Ten images from David LaChapelle’s 'Refineries and Gas' series have suddenly appeared on the top of bus stops in Central London, between Somerset House on the Strand and Trafalgar Square. The photographs were created using scale models made out of everyday objects, and are designed to be viewed from the top deck of a double-decker bus enabling the everyday commuter to become the viewer of a piece of public art whilst travelling to their destination - if they perceptive enough to spot the work.

“In these gadget and app-based times, people don’t have time to go to, say, White Cube and view work as much as they would [like to],” says George Annin, from Annïn Art, which organised the exhibition in collaboration with Transport For London to create the series of public art pieces; “There’s a whole generation of people who are glued to their iPhones. If they are going to engage with some work at any level, positively or negatively, I think it’s better than not seeing any work at all.”

Stern MagazineDavid LaChapelle: The Michelangelo of Photography August 21, 2014

New York Magazine once called him “The Fellini of Photography,” and comparisons with significantly older Italians are also conceivable. With its opulent arrangements that deal with religious and ancient myths again and again, photographer David LaChapelle’s work recalls Renaissance artists such as Michelangelo. Again and again he also quotes themes from the Bible, as when he shows rapper Kanye West as Jesus with a crown of thorns. The exhibition “David LaChapelle: Once in the Garden” is on view until September 14th, 2014 in the Ostlicht. Galerie Für Fotografie in Vienna and includes many his famous photographs. In addition, his latest works are on display, including the two-images series “Once in the Garden,” which gave its name to the exhibition.

Flaunt's 15th anniversary issue. Art cover and editorial featuring stills from the short film "Evening in Space," directed by David LaChapelle featuring Daphne Guinness in collaboration with renowned music producer Tony Visconti.

ViceThis Is What A Real Woman Looks Like (According to Austrian Bigots) July 9, 2014

Remember the NSFW Life Ball poster that drove Austria mad? Looks like the photograph of a woman with breasts AND penis got so high up some people's grill that the Freedom Party (FPÖ) (i.e. Austria's far-right guys) took it upon themselves to show us "what a real woman looks like."

Enter the poster. Put together by the youth division of the FPÖ (Ring Freiheitlicher Jugend), this naked blond and blue-eyed female is the bigots' response to transgender reality TV personalities, Conchita Wurst, gender-sensitive pronouns, and other recent attempts at making Austria a little more fun.

As part of our new digitally-led US project States of Independence we've got 50 American icons to take the Dazed Pop Quiz. Our quick-fire, Proustian Q&A has been sent out to America's biggest and brightest across the states with one running every day for the next six weeks. Today we've got prolific photographer David LaChapelle kicking things off but check back here for more throughout the series.

David LaChapelle’s photographs are a beautiful deception. He seduces the viewer with glamour – hallucinogenic lighting, neon colours, surrealist props and an elaborate set – but on closer inspection, his pictures reveal underlying cultural messages about spirituality, sexuality, religion and politics. It’s a provocative formula that the 51-year-old pioneer has applied to global ad campaigns, glossy editorials and portraits of powerful personalities such as Elizabeth Taylor, Jeff Koons, Muhammad Ali and Tupac Shakur.

Guy? Girl? Porn? Provocation? Not at all. Photographer David LaChapelle staged a mythical creature in the Garden of Eden for the Life Ball poster. An ambassadress of tolerance who reminds us that true beauty knows no gender.

Garden of Eden. The green grass glistens with nectar. A delicate pink cloud floats through the branches. Ambrosia? Its allure is irresistible. The warm light of a bizarre standing sun shines out from somewhere. This is what dusk must be like on Venus. At the heart of the scene, a goddess. She doesn't say anything, but rather lets her body speak. Somewhere a hungry animal makes a clicking sound. With each click, the creature's appearance changes. A short distance away, a man is crouching in deep concentration. He appears calm on the outside, but is full of wonder, like a small child. You can see it in the pupils of his eyes.

David LaChapelle's photographs of men - young men - have always struck me as a celebration - and one that I somewhat wistfully enjoy - of the charm and the posing self-consciousness of youthful masculinity.

The body almost never looks worked out. Still, it's never soft: always lean and tight, the kind of casual, confident torso only a college boy, one thinks, with good genes and high metabolism, could have. The stomach is taut, often more so because the model is stretching back or up - as if to show, with no real hauteur, just how casual and confident a young man's body can be. And there's often an impassive, not quite cocky, look on his face.

These are the pictures I've come to expect from LaChapelle, the kind he often publishes in Christopher Street and the Native. There are some like them in his show Good News for Modern Man. There are also surprises. If most of his men are rigid, statuesque, eminently physical, his female nudes are each an instant in a flowing vision.

New York PostDavid LaChapelle ramps up security against neo-Nazis June 7, 2014

Fashion photographer David LaChapelle’s faced some dangerous assignments — like shooting last year’s Kardashian family Christmas card — but he wasn’t taking any chances when he landed in Vienna for the Life Ball.

The lensman has become the target of Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPO), which has been described as neo-Nazi, after he created posters for the annual Austrian HIV/AIDS gala depicting naked transgender model Carmen Carrera in a garden with alternately female and male genitalia.

“David and Carmen both had four bodyguards each from the minute they landed in Vienna until the minute they left,” said a rep for the photographer, who had an exhibition at a Vienna gallery this week following the Life Ball, which included nude images of Carrera.

ArtlystDavid LaChapelle: Modern Temples Of Consumerist Worship An Ominous Vision June 6, 2014

In the first of our Artist to Artist series Michal Cole talks to and reviews the American photographer David LaChapelle's latest London exhibition 'Land Scape' at ROBILANT + VOENA.

David LaChapelle’s 'Land Scape' exhibition at ROBILANT + VOENA is a celebration of colours and textures presented in large format photographs. His work is magnetic; you can not help be attracted to its glitter and vibrancy. Standing in-front of what first seems to be a selection of oil refineries, magically glowing against a vast open space or infinite sky, you are riveted. The architecture manifests like beautiful shrines - modern temples of consumerist worship. The seduction is overwhelmingly compelling, like a child standing for the first time at the gates of Disneyland- blissfully unaware of the financial systems such a place comprises.

The AdvocateDavid LaChapelle on Life Ball, Censorship, and Identity June 4, 2014

In May celebrated photographer David LaChapelle unveiled his poster for Vienna-based HIV and AIDS charity event Life Ball. The poster, which features two nude images of transgender model Carmen Carrera, has stirred controversy abroad, with some calling the work “pornographic” and “degenerate.” The right-wing Freedom Party of Austria has taken to defacing the poster wherever it is displayed and has threatened to sue Life Ball organizers.

“Life Ball invited me to make an image for them, and I had an idea to use a transgender model who still had her— uh, I don't know what to say ... the political correctness in this situation will drive me crazy, and I don't want to just say 'penis,' but I wanted to use a woman who had both male and female attributes," LaChapelle tells The Advocate. "A woman with ... well, it's in Vienna, so let's say sausage."

Land Scape by David LaChapelle is the famous commercial photographer’s latest series of images that are, as always, characterised by his trademark bright, kitschy palate of neon hues and references to modern pop culture.

The artist has found inspiration in the act of recycling, creating small models of oil refineries using all kinds of discarded packaging and rubbish – egg cartons, drink cans, soup tins, drinking straws, cut-up cardboard – photographed in the studio or before real life backdrops, such as a skyline in California. The results are relatively convincing, and it takes a moment before one begins to notice the artificiality. The models themselves, lit up with miniature lights and shining like a fairground at dusk, look almost like theme park rides in their exaggerated, fantastical “Sleeping Beauty’s castle” designs. From their towering chimneys shoot flames that explode like fireworks in the evening sky.

London TimesWhy David LaChapelle turned his back on celebrity and got serious May 28, 2014

It is 4am in the photographer David LaChapelle’s Hollywood studio. A bright pink nearly naked “alien” in silver boots is creeping down the steps of a spaceship to plant a kiss on the mouth of the Irish/British artist and model Daphne Guinness. She is reclining, eyes shut, on a chaise longue wearing a sculptural gold metallic minidress. LaChapelle’s artistic team are clustered round the monitor, studying the footage. “It doesn’t make sense,” says someone in agitation. “She was wearing white when the alien carried her into the spaceship.”

“It makes sense in space,” LaChapelle whispers raspily: he has lost his voice after three days directing a music video and photoshoot to accompany Guinness’s forthcoming single, An Evening in Space. Making sense is not a top priority in LaChapelle’s work. Bizarre, surreal, sensual: yes. Gritty reportage: no. “Of all the photographers inventing surreal images, it is Mr LaChapelle who has the potential to be the genre’s Magritte,” said the photographer Richard Avedon.

The GuardianDavid LaChapelle's best shot: Naomi Campbell and the rape of Africa May 28, 2014

In 2009, I read an exposé about the gold trade in National Geographic magazine. Then, later that year, I found myself looking at Botticelli's Venus and Mars in London's National Gallery. I was struck by its power. It's a postcoital scene: Mars, god of war, is sleeping on all his spoils, while Venus, goddess of love, is looking unsatisfied. Things haven't changed much, I thought. Greed and war versus love and beauty.

I decided to take elements from the painting and transform them. Satyrs became child soldiers; I made Venus's dress ripped, alluding to rape, and there's a mine visible through a hole in the backdrop. I was thinking a lot about the gold mines in Africa, the deplorable conditions for workers and damage the mines do to the environment. They are so huge you can see them from space.

I wanted Venus to represent Africa, a continent that has been, and continues to be, raped – because that's where all the resources lie. Botticelli used Simonetta Vespucci, an aristocrat famous for her beauty, as his model.

Art DailyOstLicht Galerie für Fotografie opens exhibition of works by David LaChapelle June 2, 2014

VIENNA.- During the past three decades, David LaChapelle has created an extraordinary and unmistakeable oeuvre. He has worked with innumerable pop and film stars, and his powerful, provocative, humorous, glamorous, but also surreal and usually extremely colourful works have had a lasting influence on the world of photography and the aesthetics of the visual realm. The gallery OstLicht presents the exhibition David LaChapelle. Once in the Garden, featuring well-known icons of the last twenty years like Amanda Lepore: Addicted to Diamonds, Celebrity Gleam and Amanda as Andy Warhol’s Liz Taylor alongside three of his latest groups of works: Earth Laughs in Flowers, Gas and Land Scape.

Through his exploration of subjects like spirituality and religion, personality cult and physicalness, and by questioning social norms of gender and sexuality, David LaChapelle has managed to influence public awareness.

Out MagazineEXCLUSIVE: David LaChapelle Responds To Life Ball Poster Controversy May 24, 2014

Last week, the unveiling of David LaChapelle's poster for the Life Ball received mixed reaction. While some commended the photographer's artwork for depicting trans model Carmen Carrera fully naked, with both male and female attributes, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), an extreme-right political group, has called the picture "pornographic" and launched a campaign to sue the organizers of the HIV/AIDS benefit. In an exclusive interview, LaChapelle talks to Out to address the controversy, and ask for more acceptance of transgender subjects in art.

Out: What exactly is happening in Austria?

David LaChapelle: The images that I shot of Carmen Carrera are in public, posted on the streets, on bus stops, train stations, and billboards around Vienna ahead of the Life Ball. The far-right party of Austria, FPO, is now suing Life Ball because because they’re saying that the images are pornographic.

Beloved photographer David LaChapelle has released his poster designs for the annual Life Ball, and they feature one of our favorite models and transgender icons: Carmen Carrera.

According to LaChapelle, the posters are inspired by the Life Ball’s theme, “’The Garden of Earthly Delights’ and Hieronymus Bosch’s utopia of a diverse society, living together passionately and peacefully, as if the Fall of Man had never happened and people had never been expelled from Paradise.” The posters were unveiled in Vienna yesterday.

Carrera points out that the artwork’s statement, “I’m Adam, I’m Eve, I’m Me” has a special resonance for her. “Your gender should not matter in your heart or in the way you express your personality... My message is: beauty has no gender. At the end of the day beauty is beauty.”

But Austria’s far right Freedom Party (FPO) claims the images are illegal smut.
“The transgender poster . . . does not just cross the boundaries of good taste . . . but . . . also the limits of criminal law,” an FPO rep said. But LaChapelle told us most Austrians have been supportive.

Time Out LondonDavid LaChapelle: Land Scape at Robilant + Voena May 13, 2014

These aren’t oil refineries as we know them but fabricated tableaux by the kitsch-tastic David LaChapelle. If you look closer, these luminous beacons of industry are actually made out of beer cans, plastic straws and egg cartoons. Known for putting the shimmer and kaboom into commercial photography, the American artist has turned his attention to glitzing up the dirty business of energy.

There's a penis upsetting huge swathes of Austrians right now, it's that one up there, and it belongs to transgender reality TV personality Carmen Carrera. Right now, throughout the country, this amazing David LaChapelle poster is pasted on Austrian streets, advertising this year’s Life Ball in Vienna, which is probably the world’s most famous AIDS charity event.

Basically, some Austrian conservatives aren't too pleased with Carmen's dick because Carmen's dick sits beneath Carmen's tits – a combo which has never sat well with conservatives. Austria’s far-right party, the FPÖ, have filed a lawsuit against it, and one grandmother took to the streets to paint over every penis in town, supposedly after she was asked by her grandchild if she had a cock herself (which doesn't sound like a true story to me – what kid actually asks their gran questions like that?).

Fashion Week DailyDavid LaChapelle Talks Life Ball Controversy and His View On The Word Tranny May 30, 2014

David LaChapelle is no stranger to ruffling feathers, but even he was surprised at the controversy in Vienna about the posters he designed to promote Saturday night’s Life Ball. The Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), a right-wing political group, are protesting his picture, calling it pornographic, and some protesters have spray painted over the image of transgendered model Carmen Carrera, who is depicted in one shot with male genitalia and in another version tucked. Before hopping on a plane to attend Life Ball and open an exhibition of his work, LaChapelle gave us a call to tell us why he was frustrated with the protest, his thoughts on the word tranny, and why you probably won’t be seeing him at the GLAAD awards anytime soon.

What’s happening in Vienna?
I wanted to do a beautiful image. They’re basically calling this picture degenerate because it doesn’t fit into what they view as art. We’ve seen the human body since ancient Greece. We’ve been making goddesses.

Master ArtLaChapelle’s landscapes may be stunning but they are far from what they seem May 14, 2014

Multi-talented American photographer David LaChapelle excels in many mediums. He is a noted fashion and fine art photographer, music video director, film director and artist but is best known as a photographer having snapped celebrities from Jeff Koons and Hilary Clinton to Madonna and produced cover shots of Italian and French Vogue, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone.

But since 2006 LaChapelle, 51, has concentrated on fine art photography and you can see his latest body of work from May 16 to June 18 in ‘Landscape’ at Robilant and Voena’s Mayfair gallery at 38 Dover Street.

Characteristically deceptive this series of photographs seemingly depict oil refineries as temples of energy production shot in glorious technicolour.

The celebrated American artist David LaChapelle is presented in a new exhibition of landscapes at Robilant & Voena, in London. Characteristically deceptive, the series of eight photographs seemingly depict oil refineries as temples of energy production shot in glorious technicolour. On closer inspection we realise that these are far from real, rather we notice oddly recognisable objects – mobile phones, cans, egg cartons, drinking straws – a plethora of repurposed by-products of our disposable age – making up gigantic complexly handcrafted scenes. Made out of cardboard and a vast array of recycled materials these scapes were then shot variously in the Californian desert or in the artist’s LA studio, in production for over a year. They lure and repel in equal measure and question the assumptions we make about our petroleum-dependent culture, the recycling of energy and the consequences of recycling it irresponsibly. They appear magical, but LACHAPELLE would ultimately have us remember the decidedly unmagical consequences of the reality.

ARTnews, 2014Land Scape at Paul Kasmin Gallery: "Ominous as it is Lovely" May 2014

Known for extravagantly staged, hyper-real images of celebrities from the worlds of film and fashion, David LaChapelle is a crossover editorial portraitist whose work could be compared to the spooky and colorful environments of Sandy Skoglund as well as to the photographic confections of French artist duo Pierre et Gilles. For this exhibition, LaChapelle surprised viewers by presenting extremely large chromogenic prints that are devoid of people but still possess the artist's familiar sense of flash.

Consisting of two new series, "Refineries" and "Gas Stations," the exhibition, titled "LAND SCAPE," addressed contemporary environmental issues while stylishly alluding to art history. Models of factories and gas stations were crafted from disposable items such as drinking straws, hair curlers, glittered boxes, and energy-drink cans, and were lit from within. The resulting images were as elaborately and handsomely jerry-rigged as the structures are. At the same time they appear to be on the brink of falling apart, like set pieces from a deceptive stage play.

A selection of entries by photographers from all over the Northeast will be on view at the Images 2014 photography exhibit at the Fairfield Museum and History Center, opening Sunday.

The exhibition includes winning photographs from 27 Fairfield residents and a solo showing of David LaChapelle, a Fairfield native whose photos have appeared in Italian Vogue, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ and Rolling Stone magazines.

The exhibit will kick off with a preview party on Saturday from 7 to 11 p.m. when the grand prize winner of the exhibition will be announced. The grand prize winner will be awarded a 10-day exhibition at the Southport Galleries, 330 Pequot Ave., and the student grand prize winner will be given a professional portfolio review with photographer and exhibit judge, Philip Trager.

David LaChapelle's hyper-real and slyly subversive portraits have made him the world's hippest photographer. Now rave reviews for his dance doc Rize have made him Hollywood's hottest director. Here, the 'Fellini of Photography' talks to Alix Sharkey about prostitution, hanging out with Warhol and being inspired by Pammy.

David LaChapelle will sometimes burst into song, loudly, for no apparent reason. We're standing in his office when he starts belting out Madonna's 'Rain'. I mean belting it out, with hand gestures and vibrato, like he's auditioning for Broadway.

The diversity and variety of David LaChapelle’s work have no boundaries. His colour-saturated works are usually chock full of celebrities, cultural delirium and religiosity, writes Eva-Luise Schwarz exclusively for FOUR's latest International edition.

Photographer and director David LaChapelle is one of today’s most respected artists. Once called “the Fellini of photography”, he expresses cultural criticism through beauty, colour and boldness.

LaChapelle was born in Connecticut in 1963. After training as a fine artist at North Carolina School of the Arts he moved to New York at the age of 17. Upon his arrival, LaChapelle enrolled at both the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts.

Whether they are über celebrities or imposing oil refineries, fine art photographer David LaChapelle treats his subjects with iconic reverence as he skillfully orchestrates images of astonishing clarity, colorful vitality, and lyric expression. The message is decisive and bold yet it conveys the soft reveries of friendships lost through untimely deaths and once beautiful landscapes that have been debased by America's lust for power and industry.

In his work from the 1980s, LaChapelle, a Manhattan resident at the time, delved into themes of religion, sex, death, politics, money and consumption. Since moving to Hawaii in the late 1990s, LaChapelle — living on an organic farm that was formerly a nudist colony on the coast of Maui — has changed his focus to concentrate on the raping of our beautiful landscapes by private interests. The subjects have changed but LaChapelle's reverence for them, whether human or manmade, remain strong, compelling, and evocative. Whether figurescape or landscape — his intentions remain similarly focused.

Despite being criticised for being too commercial, offensively provocative and grotesque, David LaChapelle is an essential figure in photography, having been wildly successful working with the biggest names in the entertainment and fashion worlds, contributing his exuberant ideas, boundless creativity and distinctive style. Constructing decadent sets, he staged his models against baroque and delirious backdrops to produce Jolie in various states of undress and Pamela Anderson baring all in a room plastered with her Playboy spreads. As one of the world’s most in-demand photographers and directors for advertising and publishing, LaChapelle’s imprint is everywhere, having set new standards for glamorous, celebrity portraiture. He has immortalised Madonna, Elton John, Naomi Campbell, Lil' Kim, Uma Thurman, David Beckham, Paris Hilton, Hillary Clinton, visually-compelling images, each unique in their narrative and evocative content. He has the ability of making his subjects push their characters yet brings across his point with stereotypes associated with their image.

In the rapidly transforming world of CONTEMPORARY ART, how can we define “better art”? The one constant seems to be current artists’ determination to forge new paths and expand the art world. From comedian Cheech Marin to photographer David LaChapelle to unapologetic feminist Micol Hebron, we asked the newest class of revolutionaries for their opinions about how to make art better. Their answers may surprise you.

What does “better art” look like? Is it even a question to be asking? Besides elusive matters of aesthetic taste, perhaps we should focus on the experience and lasting value of art in culture in general. On TRANSCENDING THE TRENDS of the marketplace and getting at deeper issues like how the public interfaces with art, or how art can convey social, political, and historical messages (assuming that’s its preferred role), or how to identify the most effective strategies for artists (as well as curators, institutions, fairs, galleries, critics and collectors) to implement their visions, maybe even leaving room for failure.

David LaChapelle is very good at making pretty things even prettier. The celebrity photographer is best known for snapping shots of Hollywood elite and gussying them up in candy-colors. But in his most recent series, Refineries and Gas Stations, LaChapelle has turned his camera toward trash.

It’s very pretty trash, mind you. In fact, you might not realize what you’re looking at is refuse at all. Here, LaChapelle has taken everyday objects like tin cans, hair rollers, straws and measuring cups and used them as building materials to craft glimmering refineries and gas stations.

In Gas Stations, the gorgeous models look strikingly similar to their real-world counterparts. The miniaturized Shell and BP stations were crafted from cardboard and lit up like a beacon at the end of a long desolate highway. Each of the gas stations was constructed then shot on location in a Maui rainforest to create the lush surroundings you see in the final image. “I just had this image pop into my head of a glowing gas station in the jungle at night, kind of illuminated from within like a temple,” LaChapelle has said of the pieces.

In the real world, oil makes manufacturing possible. But in this model world - as created by David LaChapelle - manufactured items, such as curlers and cups, make up an oil refinery. The photographer’s latest series, which explores the production and consumption of fossil fuels, is on view through March 1 at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City.

David LaChapelle’s “LAND SCAPE” is on view from January 17 - March 1, 2014 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, which is located at 293 Tenth Avenue, New York, NY 10001 and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am - 6pm.

The Museum of Natural History was a rare hub of Fashion Week activity on Saturday night, when Pharrell Williams and G-Star Raw celebrated a partnership in which the denim company will manufacture clothing with Bionic Yarn, a textile that includes recycled plastic bottles, in a project meant to help clean up the world’s oceans.

“It can do anything that you’re wearing right now, as long as it’s not metal or leather,” said Mr. Williams, who wore a striped shirt made from the material, along with his now-infamous hat. “It’s a practice of awareness, but also making a solution that works.”

David LaChapelle, the photographer and dedicated eco-warrior, gave introductory remarks. Later, at the bar, he offered environmental advice. “The second biggest thing you can do for the environment is to be a vegan,” he said. “The first is not to procreate. But if you have a kid, raise him vegan."

“I’ll never forget, I was doing this concert—this is years and years and years ago—called Live Earth, and when I got there, I was struck by all the people who were just so into the cause and what it really meant,” said Pharrell Williams at the launch of G-Star Raw and Bionic (of which Williams is the creative director) denim at the American Museum of Natural History Saturday night. “And I was with it—I thought it was interesting and I thought it was something I could learn from.” The hip-hop mogul and producer, who wore his now favorite Vivienne Westwood hat while addressing the crowd, started looking at his own consumption and experienced a post-concert television takedown of his supposed rock-star lifestyle (“’cause I make rap, I guess,” he speculated) as a personal challenge to create environmental change. Bionic Yarn, his eco-conscious clothing developer, was the result.

Saturday Evening’s event represented a new collaboration between Bionic and G-Star Raw. “We really had to go to the very raw material that makes our jeans,” explained G-Star strategy director Thecla Schaeffer, of the team’s innovative development of denim made from recycled plastic.

After retiring from fashion and most commercial photography in 2006, David LaChapelle moved to Hawaii, planning to spend his days farming and relaxing in the tropics. The decision was inspired by his growing interest in the environment and climate change–concerns that fashion magazines, from his angle, could not seriously address. The transition, however, did not stop the 50-year-old photographer from dreaming in pictures ("Images drop in my head," he explains). Now that the barely-dressed models are gone, his subjects involve even less clothing. In "LAND SCAPE" at Paul Kasmin, LaChapelle conjures hallucinogenic renderings of industry. Factory refineries become psychedelic, candy-colored theme parks, and gas stations hidden in the jungle are akin to Indiana Jones' temples. The scenes are devoid of humans, yet a closer look reveals traces of them: cardboard, plastic hair-curlers, cups, straws, and more make up the edifices. "I like to see the craft involved," mentions LaChapelle. "You see all the defects, the tape, the fingerprints...they give it a human feeling."

Huffington Post, 2014David LaChapelle's Art and Awareness Through LAND SCAPE January 20, 2014

One of the most compelling features of David LaChapelle, as an artist and as a person, is the ability to navigate from the Hollywood celebrity scene to the New York contemporary art circuit with ease. I have been following David's career for many years and he never fails to impress me. There is something about his pieces, perhaps the surreal quality of his photographs, that draw me in and prompt my desire to see and know more. As both a person and an artist, David isn't afraid to explore deep topics while at the same time reflect them in beautifully accomplished photographs drenched in balmy hues and vigorous compositions.

I caught up with David in the midst of the installation of his most recent solo show at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The exhibit, LAND SCAPE, is comprised of two series of new photographs: Refineries and Gas Stations.

After abandoning the world of fashion photography in 2006 for a more reclusive life on a nudist colony turned working farm in Maui, Hawaii, David LaChapelle is returning to the spotlight with “Land Scape,” a new exhibition now open at Paul Kasmin Gallery. “I was in Maui, just hanging out, not thinking about anything in particular and this image of a gas station just popped into my head,” explains LaChapelle of his new, larger-than-life photographs, “It looked like a temple lit up in the jungle at night.”

Leggy models and advertiser-friendly stilettos have been replaced by miniature gas stations constructed out of recycled materials, and yet the brightly hued, energetic aesthetic is unmistakably the work of LaChapelle. “I try to use beauty to draw people in instead of repel them,” said the artist-turned-environmental activist. “And hopefully through these images I am able to make a connection.”
“Land Scape” is on exhibit at Paul Kasmin through March 1st, 2014.

LAND SCAPE is an exhibition of new photographs by David LaChapelle, comprised of two series: Refineries and Gas Stations.

“The sites depicted in LaChapelle’s LAND SCAPE represent the globally networked industrial infrastructure of oil production and distribution. The gas stations and refineries that populate iconic locations are staged as architectural avatars of a planet coping with the stresses of peak-oil — even as the buildings’ dazzling spectacle and retro-future aesthetic distracts from the dangers of their function. Both bodies of work use handcrafted scale models, constructed of cardboard and a vast array of recycled materials from egg cartons to tea canisters, hair curlers, and other by-products of our petroleum-based, disposability-obsessed culture.”

Fine-art and commercial photographer David LaChapelle has captured everything from Paris Hilton to Jesus as a “homeboy” in his brilliant, candy-colored images. His latest body of work, “Land Scape,” shifts into a new focus for him: peak oil and culture’s excessive waste of its by-products. Creating elaborate sets from cardboard and recycled materials, such as hair curlers and egg cartons, LaChapelle transported the scale models to Maui and the coastlines of California to create and photograph dazzling scenes of man-made structures tarnishing their surroundings. The collection of photographs, made up of two series called Refineries and Gas Stations, is currently on display at the Paul Kasmin Gallery.

Commercial photographer David LaChapelle, known for his photographs of Paris Hilton and Nicki Minaj, shoots man-made gas stations and oil refineries in new glowing photographs.

David LaChapelle, commercial photographer to the stars, takes on a new political agenda in his latest collection of pictures, known as “Land SCAPE.”

The surrealist photographs, in which LaChapelle captures fluorescent, man-made gas stations and oil refineries in two different series (Gas Stations and Oil Refineries), feature retro-futuristic constructions in two outdoor settings. These “architectural avatars,” as described in LaChapelle’s exhibition material, are made of cardboard, recycled materials and myriad waste products that proliferate our “disposability-obsessed culture.”

David LaChapelle is well-known for his flashy, glamorous magazine covers, but a new photography exhibition sees the artist dabbling in environmental commentary. LAND SCAPE features a series of photographs that depict international symbols of waste like refineries and gas stations, and utilize over-saturated and fantastical colors to distract from the dangers that these buildings pose on their surrounding lands.

You may know David LaChapelle’s name from having shot the 2013 Kardashian family Christmas card. However, if that is where you know him from you may want to re-evaluate some life choices since it’s a lonely world for a man that can spout-out that fact as quickly as he can tell you what day it is, Monday. Though many still don’t know him by name or his art, the latter you’ve undoubtedly seen. From his controversial Rolling Stone cover depicting Kanye as Jesus to countless other covers and celebrity portraits and his feature length documentary Rize to numerous music videos including, a personal favorite, Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” video you’ve most likely seen his work.

In photographer David LaChapelle’s latest series, no actors or musicians pose in garish costume; no models act out fantastic scenes on exaggerated sets. In fact, no humans appear at all. Though LaChapelle is known for his highly-stylized images of high-profile figures—among them Elton John, Madonna, Lil’ Kim, and Björk—the photographs in the artist’s collection “Land SCAPE,” now on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery, find their subjects in hand-built models of gas stations and refineries.

There is a postapocalyptic element to the structures, which are shot in such a way so as to appear life-size. Glittering refineries, devoid of workers, sit alone in the desert or on vacant coastline. Elsewhere, in dense rain forest, we encounter glowing fuel pumps, empty of cars or customers, the jungle slowly encroaching. This notion of forgotten worlds is not lost on LaChapelle. “These buildings are artifacts of a fallen civilization,” he told AD on the eve of the show’s opening. “If some future archaeologist were to uncover a gas station, like our archaeologists uncover Incan temples, that would be an indicator of what made this civilization rise and fall.”

Time Out New York, 2014David LaChapelle talks about his new gallery show "Land Scape" January 15, 2014

Once among the highest-paid commercial photographers, David LaChapelle curtailed his lucrative career in 2005, bought a farm in Hawaii and returned to his artistic roots—a life change that’s led to museum and gallery shows worldwide. Time Out New York talked to the Maui artist about his new “Gas Station” and “Refineries” series, which comment on our consumption of—and addiction to—oil.

How did these projects come about?
I had this idea of a glowing temple in the rain forest that was a little gas station. As the project progressed, I began thinking about what it meant. Everyone goes to the gas station, whether you’re in the tea party or the Taliban. It’s universal. But it’s had a devastating effect on the planet.

Given world renowned photographer David LaChapelle’s immersion in the realm of celebrity and pop culture — including his recent starring role in creating the Kardashian family’s most over-the-top Christmas card yet — it is hard not to be partly taken aback by the subject matter in his new exhibition: dramatic shots of oil refineries and gas stations that offer extensive discourse on the precarious state of the planet and the human race.

“I just had this image in my head of a gas station in the jungle like a little glowing temple,” LaChapelle told ARTINFO several days before the exhibition’s January 17 opening, during an interview at the gallery. “I didn’t know what it meant at the time. I just saw the image and I thought it was beautiful. I told my friend and we started building models out of simple materials like cardboard.”

“I’ve always done what’s on my mind,” says David LaChapelle, recalling a vision that came to him two and a half years ago on his farm in eastern Maui. “An image popped into my head—I saw this glowing gas station in the jungle at night.” Though he didn’t know why he was doing it at the time, LaChapelle set about manifesting this imagined gas station (Gas BP, 2013, pictured below) via painted corrugated cardboard, LED lights and various reflective materials sourced from the local 99-cent store. “At first I just thought it was enchanting looking; the original idea was about an archaeologist from a millenium beyond stumbling upon the ruins of an ancient civilization.” But headlines about climate change of peak oil sent his mind racing in a new direction.

Here’s the deal. You wouldn’t have done any of this, David LaChapelle wouldn’t have taken the photos in this feature, we wouldn’t have printed this magazine, and Obamacare wouldn’t be causing grief, if not for oil. Therein is the focus, the crux, the cookie crumble. The bees knees, the Don Johnson, the cat’s pajamas. See his optically elusive renderings lurking in the jungle, providing power to no one, and everyone. It’s all the same, he’ll say, a pool, exhausted, nauseated, overwhelmed, hurried, needy, pleading, ready, primed, exorbitant: this modern life. What some gung ho motherfuckers extracted from the grounds of Pennsylvania, or Mesopotamia, or wherever it’s argued this can-do came from, good or bad it is not. We humans, though, we have our variances, our capabilities. David LaChapelle is a contemporary artist, who came up with oil, like you and everyone else. He’s a visionary, he’s a lot of fun.

Black Book, 2014David LaChapelle’s Dystopian Fantasy: In His Own Words January 16, 2014

“LAND SCAPE,” David LaChapelle’s new show opening tomorrow at Paul Kasmin Gallery, finds the photographer flirting with his inner Thomas Demand. It features a series of slickly produced compositions, all of which appear to be lurid industrial scenes (perhaps snapped along one of New Jersey’s more toxic arteries). In reality, they’re all constructed models, cobbled together out of simple materials. “In a conflicted manner, the photographs in the series present the future: a dystopian terrain that is at once enticing and fearsome, familiar and foreign,” he says. I asked LaChapelle to share a bit of the behind-the-scenes process for two of the new works.

At first glance David LaChapelle's Land Scape series of photographs look a little like Edward Burtynsky's 2009 oil-industry images, or Ed Ruscha's better-known Twenty Six Gas Stations series. Yet on closer inspection, these refineries and petrol pumps aren't lifelike representations, but photographs of scale models, crafted from consumer goods, such as hair curlers, that are themselves made with a little help from oil industry derivatives.

In an accompanying essay for Land Scape, on show at Paul Kasmin in New York until 1 March, the critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot writes that LaChapelle's series "represents the globally networked industrial infrastructure of oil production and distribution. The gas stations and refineries that populate iconic locations are staged as architectural avatars of a planet coping with the stresses of peak-oil, - even as the buildings' dazzling spectacle and retro-future aesthetic distracts from the dangers of their function."

Gone are the days of prima donnas stoically arranged in ballet’s third position, belting out the third act of La Traviata while a harem of rich patrons twist uncomfortably on velvet thrones; this coloratura soprano attacks her roles with an agility reserved for roe deer in the throws of a robust hunting season. She’s since retired the vengeance aria, and though atypical, of most Night Queens, she continues to sustain a vigorous career in its absence. With a current repertoire rivaling the length of Der Ring des Nibelungen as well as a debut in Iain Bell’s original A Harlot’s Progress as Moll Hackabout at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien during the 2013/2014 season, Damrau continues to reign Queen.

Diana Damrau, photographed by David LaChapelle, for the portrait gallery of the Bayerische Staatsoper (Bavarian State Opera) in Munich, Germany.

In the rapidly transforming world of CONTEMPORARY ART, how can we define “better art”? The one constant seems to be current artists’ determination to forge new paths and expand the art world. From comedian Cheech Marin to photographer David LaChapelle to unapologetic feminist Micol Hebron, we asked the newest class of revolutionaries for their opinions about how to make art better. Their answers may surprise you.

American photographer David LaChapelle is an interesting case of an artist at the crossroads of art and advertising, having made his name through his highly- colorful fashion photography and flamboyantly baroque and often carefree portraits of celebrities, together with an interest in the underside of the American dream, pop culture and the history of art. In his dream factory, beside popular icons of industry, fashion and music, elaborate stagings that tell entertaining stories emerge in the “tableau vivant” genre. In doing so, his compositions often refer to artworks from previous centuries, for example a recent photographic fresco reinterpreting Leonardo da Vinci’s "Last Supper" featuring figureless floating heads and expressive yet detached hands inside cardboard boxes, which compositionally represents the original. a recurrent subject for the artist who mixes the sacred and the profane, he continues to reflect on the renaissance of the spiritual in our material- dominated society.

David is a commercial movie and portrait photographer whose career began in the ‘80s, when he began exhibiting his work in New York. His photography caught the eye of pop art legend Andy Warhol, who gave David his first photographic job, photographing celebrities for Interview magazine. David went on to have his work featured in Italian and French Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and i-D. David has photographed the likes of Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna, Eminem, Lance Armstrong, Leonardo DiCaprio and Britney Spears.

After his stint in contemporary photography, David decided to branch out to the world of music videos, documentary films and theatrical events, producing work for the likes of Moby, Christina Aguilera, No Doubt and stage works including Elton John’s The Red Piano and Caesar’s Palace.

Amherst Bulletin"It's An American Thing" at Herter Art Gallery November 14, 2013

Elvis Presley on the threshold of stardom. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward in a decidedly modest early home. Scrawny Woody Allen walking alongside the towering fashion model and actress Tamara Dobson. And a panoply of images of more ordinary Americans amid some of our quirkier landscapes.

It’s all part of two photo exhibits this month at the Herter Gallery at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that play off one another in unusual ways. They both offer indelible images of America that gallery director Trevor Richardson says should be of interest to a broad audience, from connoisseurs of photography to students and others interested in United States popular culture.

“It’s an American Thing,” the larger of the two shows, is a group exhibit, mostly in black and white, featuring the work of 14 U.S. photographers dating back to the 1930s. Their subject? Vintage Americana, whether that’s defined by famous faces, cultural references or style.

“If I can use beauty as a tool, even if it is subversive, I would do that. Beauty is, for myself, necessary”. With this clear demonstration of intentions, David LaChapelle (Connecticut, 1963) defines the big guidelines that mark his work. With an extensive body of work that includes portraits of great celebrities of the world of fashion and films, scenes with surrealist touches based on religious events, citations of great works of Art history and an endless production marked by the saturation, the colour and the movement, the North American photographer has achieved an aesthetic which is already recognized as his own.

His latest series of photographs, Still Life, exhibited in the Daniel Templon Gallery in Paris, reflects how the artist -using the same topic that defines a great portion of his work- shows a critical point of view about the perception of beauty. And at the same time revealing a more conceptual approach to photography.

The Daily Beast‘Masculin/Masculin,’ a Retrospective of Male Nudity in Art, Opens in Paris September 25, 2013

Some of the most contemporary works included are a David LaChapelle photo of Eminem, About to Blow, featuring the rapper naked and holding a firework over his crotch, or Pierre Commoy and Gilles Blanchard’s Vive la France, featuring three men of different races standing in a stadium, wearing only socks and cleats in, respectively, blue, white, and red. Using the maximum of kitsch, the masculinity of LaChapelle and Pierre et Gilles is tongue in cheek: not aggressive, but antagonistic. Goading with flat colors and garish taste, it’s arguable whether such work is actually provocative beyond simply exploiting and toying with gender norms.

For years David LaChapelle was the go-to photographer for the world’s biggest stars: Michael Jackson, Hilary Clinton, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Madonna, Elton John. Produce a name and he will raise you a portrait. Dubbed ‘the Fellini of photography’, LaChapelle’s work graced the covers of the most prestigious publications in the world, transforming this Connecticut born genius, who was bullied at school and ran away to New York at 15, one of the most respected photographers on the planet.

In 2006, at the height of his career, he ditched celebrity, changed gears and bought a former nudist colony in Maui, Hawaii. Immersed in nature, David found his way back to his first love, fine art, and after six months of solitude re-entered both world and gallery.

About Last Night | A Chelsea Gallery, Made Over as a Decadent Nightclub

Featured works from famed photographer David LaChapelle include “Whitney Houston: Noisy Fame” and “ Whitney Houston: But Now I See.” During the opening, a gallery go-er presented a skateboard which has previously unpublished Beastie Boys images by LaChapelle on the bottom of the deck. The special edition skateboard is from “Room + Boards,” a charity event that was held in late June of this year.

ArtlystAmerican Photographer David LaChapelle Featured In New Paris Exhibition June 21, 2013

Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, presents the American photographer David LaChapelle featuring two powerful series in France for the first time: Still Life, and the innovative Last Supper. World-renowned for his highly colorful fashion photography and flamboyantly baroque portraits of celebrities, David LaChapelle surprises us here with a new approach that bears witness to his interest in the underside of the American dream and the history of art.

David LaChapelle is an icon hunter obsessed by the question of notoriety, and when vandals had attacked the Dublin Wax Museum he traveled there to make a record of the broken lookalikes, which led him to investigate many wax museums in the United States (California and Nevada).

ARTINFOFrieze New York Sales: Ropac, Lisson, Kasmin Score Major Deals May 13, 2013

At almost every turn, art transactions were popping, as evidenced at New York’s Paul Kasmin, where star photographer David LaChapelle’s “Gas Shell” (2013), an edition of five chromogenic prints, sold for approximately $65,000, and Walton Ford’s unique and quite fantastic painting of a flying tiger, “Tri Thong Minh,” sold to an American collector in the vicinity of the $950,000 asking price. In Warhol-inspired style — but with more humor — Deborah Kass’s “12 Barbaras (Jewish Jackie Series)” (1993), a silkscreen on canvas at 60 by 55 inches, also went for approximately $95,000 at Kasmin.

“All of the serious, major collectors and museum people are here,” said Bethanie Brady, the Kasmin director. As if confirming that impression, storied art collector and former gallery owner Irving Blum sat on one of the chairs in the Kasmin stand, studying the Frieze map, before resuming his travels.

David LaChapelle spent more than two decades producing glossy images of pop icons for Vanity Fair, Interview, and Rolling Stone. By the mid-aughts, fighting exhaustion, he retreated to Maui Hawaii and has re-emerged as much more than a fashion photographer.

In Still Life, his new exhibition on view at both Paul Kasmin Gallery locations, LaChapelle captures the disarray caused by vandals who broke into three wax museums, including the Nation Wax Museum in Dublin Ireland. His eerie images of dismembered icons (Madonna, Michael Jackson, Leonardo DiCaprio) are meant to show the fleeting nature of fame, celebrity and power.

Still Life was born after LaChapelle visited a vandalized wax museum. The result are large photographs of dismembered wax figures of celebrities. There is a dark cynicism to these images, especially in light of LaChapelle’s earlier work, which was a lot of about the fantastical life of celebrities, and is only heightened if you are not aware of the back story of where the body parts came from (as I didn’t when I first saw the show). There is something incredibly delightful and gratifying in the darkness of these photographs that makes viewing them that much sweeter.

Art TerritoryWhat to expect from David LaChapelle’s newest exhibition? November 29, 2012

American photographer David LaChapelle (1963) is one of those idiosyncratic, modern-day artists who was discovered by Andy Warhol and offered a job at Interview magazine. The artist began his career in the 1980's, and already by 2003, American Photo Magazine listed him as one of today's most influential photographers. Original and eccentric, LaChapelle is also active in the fields of film, advertising and the fashion industry, and occasionally, he will combine all of these subjects into the carefully orchestrated scenes of his art photography. From November 30 through March 3 of 2013, Stockholm's museum of photography, Fotografiksa, will be showing LaChapelle's photo exhibition, Burning Beauty – a collection of some of the artist's most distinctive works. The pictures on view are saturated with the aesthetics of daily life and consumer products, but at the same time, they point to our overreaching search for the soul – which is paradoxical and grotesque, but also quite fascinating.

David LaChapelle knows his way around a plastic face. While the photographer has been transitioning from fashion to fine art of late, he still finds himself shooting the once-relevant, almost-famous, forever-iconic—and all combinations thereof.

In Still Life, an exhibition of new works at both Paul Kasmin locations in New York, LaChapelle has photographed the assembled broken body parts from a break-in of a wax museum in Dublin, as well as other wax museums in California and Nevada. The resulting waxy build-up of the likes of Ronald Reagan, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Michael Jackson addresses notions of humanity, fame, celebrity and power.

Examiner'Still Lifes' of Reagan, Michael Jackson, and others on view in Chelsea November 28, 2012

The Paul Kasmin Gallery is currently featuring an exhibition by Dave LaChapelle titled Still Life on view at both of the gallery’s locations. For this show, LaChapelle presents several photographs that he took of broken and disembodied wax figures of politicians and celebrities.

After learning of an incident of vandalism that occurred in 2009 at the National Wax Museum in Dublin, Ireland, LaChapelle became intrigued and was granted permission to photograph the mutilated figures. LaChapelle went a step further by taking more photographs at two other museums in California and Nevada respectively.

The photographer has long had a keen, if not entirely healthy, interest in celebrity, so when he heard about the vandalism of figures at a Dublin wax museum, they made an irresistible subject. Although the still-lifes of slashed and shattered heads and hands are enlarged to a ridiculously large scale, the images are as compelling as they are crass. Among the ruins are Michael Jackson, Bill Clinton, Ayatollah Khomeini, and Marlene Dietrich (a ringer for Cindy Sherman), but the spectacular, thirteen-part series of the decapitated cast of the Last Supper is hard to beat. Through Jan. 19.

The exhibition, which gives an overall picture of David LaChapelles production is extreme in many ways - there are many images in huge formats shown. And each image in itself is extreme with its expression, its complexity and all its elaborate details.

Some people think that David LaChapelle is superficial, but then you have probably not seen so many of his works. He has an extreme diversity and yet a an intriguing continuity, says Min-Jung Jonsson together with Patrik Steorn been the curators of the exhibition that fills all the exhibition space on the photographic.The images are powerful and filled with details. Each image takes time to watch.

However, his current exhibition, entitled "Still Life," is an eerie foil to his classic approach. Instead of glowing figures ascending to holy ranks we see familiar faces cracked, discarded, and devoid of life. The photos below were taken after vandals broke into the National Wax Museum in Dublin in 2007; they disrobed Adolf Hitler, stole Fred Flinstone and left around 50 figures in various states of disarray. LaChapelle captures the museum debris with his camera, showing the Ozymandias-like celebrities and politicians in pieces. Many of the smashed idols, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Madonna, were arguably tossed out of the cultural conversation just as violently.

Otherwise, "Burning beauty" in advance a given success. LaChapelle attracted 15,000 visitors when brothers Broman 2008 exhibited his works in Nacka, outside Stockholm, and now they expect to at least 100,000, maybe even up to 140 000 people to come and see the approximately 250 works.

It is LaChapelles greatest show ever - the entire museum is filled with images from the 1980s and up to date. Enormous contemporary tableaux covering the walls; Courtney Love as the grieving Mary, Michael Jackson as Jesus, an anonymous model who crushed by a giant hamburger and a modern Icarus plunged into a sea of used computers. David LaChapelle see clear patterns in their career.

The photographer known for his flamboyant, irreverent style presents a new series.

House of Wax

LaChapelle’s new images capture the forlorn, destroyed celebrity wax figures from Dublin’s National Wax Museum and other collections—piles of fractured faces, fingerless hands, and faceless noses, plus a beheaded Leonardo DiCaprio—to create a disturbing meditation on the ephemeral and often destructive nature of celebrity.

David LaChapelle began making photographs in the early Eighties in New York City while around him friends were dying of AIDS. His early black and white photos, shot by window light and manipulated in the darkroom through bleaching, burning or collaging, explored “metaphysical themes” of mortality and transcendence through religious imagery – winged figures, crosses and bodies bathed in a celestial light. After a hugely successful career as a commercial photographer, video director and documentary filmmaker, LaChapelle has recently returned to “metaphysical themes that still interest me.” In his keynote at PhotoPlus Expo, he showed the work he’s recently shown in galleries and museums: images using religious iconography, images of transcendence, and vintage work that was rarely seen. Since 2005, he has not shot a fashion assignment. “I didn’t burn out, as some people have written. I walked away.”

David LaChapelle has for 25 years created a transnational imagery. At the beginning of his career he depicted life and death - home New York's good and bad sides. Artist Presidency was marked by that he constantly asked himself how it was that he just had to live when all his friends died of AIDS.

Some people like David LaChapelle has photographed are David Bowie, Madonna, Uma Thurman, Tupac Shakur, Eminem, Lady Gaga, David Beckham and Michael Jackson. He has also devoted himself to music videos, below you can see the result of a collaboration with British songbird Florence + the Machine.
Burning Beauty runs from 30 November 2012 and 3 March 2013, and is one of the most impressive exhibitions Photographic ever curated. Something you simply can not miss.

The American art, fashion and advertising photographer David LaChapelle , known for his exaggerated realism, showing its largest exhibition ever of Photographic in Stockholm, starting tomorrow. David LaChapelle was in place during today's press preview.

- I am very happy to see my analog images from the 1980s in a gallery. I could hardly believe that they would see the light of day again, says David.

Photo of the Day by PDNDavid LaChapelle: Artist or Artless? October 25, 2012

“In his series Earth Laughs in Flowers, “LaChapelle conveys the obsessions and compulsions of his own time. On the compositional level, things are not arranged neatly in front of us, in order to enable us to decipher them. There is much overlapping, and photography has been extended to include the technique of collage. LaChapelle is always concerned with the “that-has-been” of photography. Despite all subsequent editing, his presentations must have existed, even if only for a brief instant.” – Kristin Schrader.

“Mr. Avedon said of all the photographers inventing surreal images, it was Mr. LaChapelle who has the potential to be the genre’s Magritte... Mr. LaChapelle is certain to influence a new generation of photographers in the same way that Mr. Avedon pioneered so much of what is familiar today.” Amy Spindler, The New York Times, June 17, 1997

After a stint in London, LaChapelle returned to New York and in 1988 did a show of color photographs called Your Needs Met at 56 Bleecker Gallery. “There’s a lot of sincerity and intention going into these pictures, there’s nothing ironic about them. When I was making them I never had any aspirations to be rich or famous or anything. I just wanted to share these pictures with people and touch them, I wanted to share images that I loved.”

David LaChapelle is inspired by everything from art history and street culture to the Hawaiian jungle in which he lives, projecting an image of twenty-first century pop culture through his work that is both loving and critical. He has an exceptional talent for combining a unique hyper-realistic aesthetic with profound social messages. His career began in the 1980’s when he started showing his artwork in New York City galleries. Catching the eye of Andy Warhol, who offered him his first photography job at Interview Magazine, LaChapelle gained recognition by shooting memorable photographs of celebrities. Later in his career, his striking images graced the covers and pages of Italian Vogue, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone and i-D. He has photographed personalities as diverse as Tupac Shakur, Madonna, Lance Armstrong, Elizabeth Taylor, David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, and Muhammad Ali. LaChapelle has also branched out to direct music videos for artists to live theatrical events, and to direct documentary films. His directing credits include music videos for artists such as Christina Aguilera, Moby, Jennifer Lopez, Britney Spears, stage work for Elton John's 'The Red Piano' and the Caesar's Palace spectacular, and Sundance award winning 'Krumped' documentary film.

He has had record breaking solo museum exhibitions at the Barbican Museum, London (2002), Palazzo Reale, Milan (2007), Museo del Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City (2009), the Musée de La Monnaie, Paris (2009), and the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel.

Later in his career, his striking images graced he covers and pages of Italian Vogue, French Vogue, Vanity Fair, GQ, Rolling Stone and i-O. He has photographed personalities as diverse as Tupac Shakur, Madonna, Lance Armstrong, Elizabeth Taylor, David Beckham, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, and Muhammad AIi. LaChapelle has also branched out to direct music videos for artists to live theatrical events, and direct documentary films.

The Art NewspaperBrand names slip as market starts to correct November 2012

David LaChapelle’s Seismic Shift, 2012, says it all: artists and collectors are reacting against the carefree works that were popular during the raging noughties. The large-scale LaChapelle photograph, on sale at Paul Kasmin’s stand at Frieze London in October, shows a room of familiar works by Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami, among others, rocked by the force of an imaginary earthquake. The image, by an artist who has been no stranger to the colorful, often flippant art that came to the fore during the art market’s recent boom, mirrors the marked shift in taste that prevailed during Frieze week.

Tuscany Arts"If you want reality, take the bus." LaChapelle in Lucca July 26, 2012

An intense journey, one series after another. From Star System – voices, passions, obsession, follies, fixations and torments of the music, fashion and movie industry – to Deluge – a warning to our frivolous and consumerist society. From Destruction and Disaster – where beautiful models, with impeccable dresses and make-up, are photographed in catastrophic scenarios – to the oneiric world of Dreams. From Negative Currency – where Lachapelle use an experimental technique with dollar notes in place of the negative – to Earth Laughs in Flowers, one of his latest series – “classic” floral compositions corrupted by abandoned toys, bags, vegetables, mobile phones, plastic items.

David LaChapelle has a message for all the frustrated artists out there, the legion shut-out of galleries, ignored by critics and dissed by the public at large: go do something else. And if you can keep in mind why you wanted to be an artist in the first place, all that you wished for might come back to you in the end. LaChapelle didn’t quite put it this way when we sat down together in March for a public conversation at the School of Visual Arts Theatre in New York, but I had seen his recent work in an exhibition at Fred Torres Collaborations – a group of large still lifes collectively titled Earth Laughs in Flowers – and it confirmed his re-entry into the New York art world. I wanted to ask him about this, since he was now clearly on a different path from the one that made him famous and made his images notorious in the fashion world. What he revealed was the overriding importance of artistic vision in everything he has done. Almost from the start, the art world did its best to ignore him, and yet if it hadn’t been for that, there might not have been a David LaChapelle. In the early 1980s, LaChapelle came to New York after finishing art school and found it to be the place where he truly
belonged.

Photographer David LaChapelle’s hugely anticipated retrospective opened over the weekend at Bexco Art Center, Busan, South Korea. The exhibition showcases over 200 classic and recent photographs.

Alongside familiar subversive photographs originally commissioned for fashion and celebrity editorials, the show explores LaChapelle’s personal projects, created recently as part of his artistic and critical expression.

Fred Torres Collaborations is proud to announce David LaChapelle’s Second Retrospective in Korea. The city of Busan partners with the city of Seoul in premiering David LaChapelle’s Retrospective, uniting the cities’ young & fast growing art scenes. This will mark Korea’s first major push in aligning the two young art hubs.

Exhibition opens to the public on Saturday, June 16th, on view through the fall, closing September 16th, 2012. Students welcome. For any group tours please contact us at curatorial@fredtorres.com . Opening this week, photographer David LaChapelle’s hugely anticipated Asian Museum retrospective will be exhibited at Bexco Art Center. The exhibition will have over two-hundred classic and recent photographs on view.
This retrospective of David LaChapelle’s work will provide a comprehensive view of his unique and daring style of the past twenty years.

The edition size is made of 40 prints and 12 Artist Proofs, each sized 20 x 24 inches. Each portfolio is enclosed in a custom-designed, archival photographic storage box that includes the ten photographs, a table of contents and a letter to the purchaser signed by Sir Elton John. Photographs included in the EJAF Photography Portfolio II are unique and are only available through purchase of the entire $25,000 portfolio.

The artist, who has penchant for embedding cultural references or humorous asides in his painstakingly choreographed works, walks the line between sublime beauty, disorderly decadence, and comedic kitsch. Through acts of visual trickery, he transmutes the polished perfection of Baroque compositions of flowers, fruits, masks, classical busts, and candles into the medium of photography. As opulent as they first appeared, these knowingly delusional images carried a whiff of emptiness and decay, in the artistic tradition of vanitas. Within each elaborately constructed arrangement lurks a note of subversive surrealism in the form of objects representative of contemporary consumer society: mobile phones, cigarette butts, a toy airplane, balloons, a child’s water pistol, a can of Reddi-wip.

The Jewish WeekTim Boxer At American Friends Of Tel Aviv Museum Of Art May 2012

LaChapelle told me that he was born in Fairfield, Conn., to Huguenot parents. His ancestors were Protestants who fled persecution in France in the 17th century to freedom in Canada.

Two decades ago LaChapelle stayed in a kibbutz and would hop on a bus to the Tel Aviv Museum. “I met Moti who was so welcoming I felt relaxed,” he said of Mordechai Omer, director and chief curator.

He was so taken with the warmth of the people of Israel and “their personification of living in the moment – at the beach, in the cafes, on the scooters. The way they embraced life was so different from anything I experienced.”

Some years ago at the height of his fame as a fashion photographer, David LaChapelle had a brush with mortality and began to question his life, which had taken him from the wilds of Fairfield, Connecticut, in the 1960s, to the New York of Studio 54 where he met Andy Warhol along his path to become an artist during the 1970s, to being the go-to guy for Interview, Vogue, Tank, I-D and countless other magazines, with a number of important books including the influential LaChapelle Land (1997) and Hotel LaChapelle (1999), as well as innumerable gallery and museum shows.

Your new body of work features photographs of baroque flower arrangements. As someone who became famous photographing people, what draws you to this surprising new genre?

I love stories/narratives that can be found in the old masters’ still lifes. Every object and even certain flowers carry symbolic meaning. For me it’s about the “vanitas,” the idea of transitions in life, nature, and how they remind us of our own mortality, the brevity of life, and the beauty in each season.

A line stretched out of the gallery at Fred Torres Collaborations but it wasn't for Madonna. David LaChapelle's new photography show, "Earth Laughs In Flowers," is devoid of the celebrity images that made him famous. The painterly photos feature Baroque flowers surrounded by modern disarray such as pill bottles, cigarettes and cellphones.

A very tightly squeezed crowd, which included Courtney Love, Daphne Guinness, model Hana Soukupova and nightlife icon Amanda Lepore, mingled as Adele hits played (Mr. LaChapelle is a great fan.)

Fab 5 Freddy was happy to celebrate his old friend. The pair met on Mr. LaChapelle's first paid assignment as a photographer, when he was asked to photograph the graffiti artist. "Years later when we would meet he would say 'Oh my God, that was the first job I was paid to shoot.' I was like, 'Get the hell out of here!'" Fab 5 Freddy said. "We've been friends ever since."

GOING FOR BAROQUE...: Less than 24 hours before David LaChapelle opened his new exhibition at a walk-up gallery on New York’s West 29th Street, the photographer stopped by to see how things were coming along. The staff had hung the last of his large-scale, still-life Baroque-style flower photographs minutes before his arrival and LaChapelle walked around the room slowly, nodding in approval. If he was nervous about the Thursday night opening, he didn’t show it.

The press release about LaChapelle’s new series said it appropriates “traditional Baroque still life paintings,” but that doesn’t really do them justice. First of all, they are each 72-inches tall and it’s not just flowers and fruit shot against a black background. His flowers are wilting, some poisonous. He’s replaced classic accompaniments, such as a horn of fruit, with a Michael Jackson-headlined New York Post, sex toys, Cheetos and prescription pill bottles.

Time was, David LaChapelle’s hyperrealistic, slightly subversive photography was everywhere you looked. His portraits of everyone from Madonna to Hillary Clinton were mainstays on the magazine rack, and then—poof—after years of unparalleled success (and the release of a highly acclaimed documentary in 2005), he seemed to disappear from the public eye altogether.

“I did disappear,” LaChapelle says, back in New York briefly for the opening of his new show, “Earth Laughs in Flowers,” which opened at Fred Torres Collaborations gallery in Chelsea last night and runs through March 24. “I checked out completely. I bought a 25-acre farm in the jungle in Maui and lived there with two friends and some pigs. I needed to change my life.”

Paper MagazineDavid LaChapelle Talks Old Masters, Quitting the Fashion Game and Newt Gingrich February 24, 2012

Last night, the art crowd gathered at the Fred Torres Collaborations gallery for Earth Laughs In Flowers, a new exhibit of still life photographs by famed photographer, David LaChapelle. At first glance, the photos feature expansive and lush flowers reminiscent of paintings by the Dutch Masters but, upon closer inspection, elements of LaChapelle's signature blend of wealthy excess and the grotesque are present: phallic doll parts, Cheetos, pill bottles and toilet paper peek out from fancy floral arrangements and mingle amid ripe fruit.

LaChapelle, who famously quit shooting fashion for magazines and moved to Hawaii in 2006 at what some might say was the peak of his influence, has clearly not lost any admirers. The packed gallery had people spilling down the stairs and into the street where a long line waited to get in PAPERMAG had the chance to talk to LaChapelle about his exhibit, about his decision to move off the grid and buy a farm in Hawaii and what he'd do if he got a call to photograph Newt Gingrich.

Huffington PostDavid LaChapelle Reflects On Art, Life and His Latest Accomplishment February 21, 2012

I ask if with the Earth Laughs In Flowers series he is scoping out a new direction in his fine art career. "This wasn't a strategic career move... it was intuitive. Baroque still lives were what happened to inspire me at that moment..As well as exploring the interplay between the medium of photography and the old master paintings."

'None of that, none of the money really matters to me. I've always had three prayers -- and they were answered: to make a living off my photography, to live in a cabin in the woods, and to be able to eat in Angelica whenever I wanted."

His deep thoughts are perhaps surprising given that LaChapelle's photography has in the past been dismissed by critics as superficial and materialistic. Did that annoy him? "It did at the time, a little bit – and sometimes more than a little bit – but now, looking back, it's changing, and people are seeing things in the work today that they once weren't. With a little distance you can see that [the photographs] were about the choices America was making at the time. It wasn't condemning, it was done with humour and beauty."

Titled Earth Laughs in Flowers, this exhibition consists of 10 works of different dimensions, glazed C-prints shot from 2008 to 2011, which revisit the foundations of seventeenth-centrury art, in particular the Flemmish tradition, but also, for example, the mastery of Mario "de' Fiori" of the Roman baroque period and his floral still life. David LaChapelle has given life to opulent images, rich with brilliant, vibrant colors, which appear to be elsewhere, filtered, misty with a vanitas surface sensation, a meditation on the natural disintegration of things. Rich floral compositions of roses, mega-colorful baroque-looking tulips, lilies and calla lilies, which, in their own right, turn into convectors of the history of painting, dancing between their own beauty and the melancholy necessity of death.

The title Earth Laughs in Flowers comes from the poem “Hamatreya” (1846) by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), in which flowers articulate nature’s ridicule and contempt for human arrogance in the pretense to dominion over earth.

Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds:
And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.
Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys
Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs;
Who steer the plough, but cannot steer their feet,
Clear of the grave.”

The titles of the works refer to the cycles of the seasons and of life: Springtime, Late Summer, Early Fall, Deathless Winter, and Concerning the Soul. In typical memento mori fashion, the works invite us in, beg our self-reflection, and remind us to enjoy life before it’s over.

From Tuesday February 14, the Robilant & Voena gallery in London will play host to a new series of works by American fine-art photographer David LaChapelle. The ten large-scale images, titled 'Earth Laughs in Flowers', will additionally be on display in Milan and at the St. Moritz Art Masters festival this month.

Photographer David LaChapelle, most famous for his striking and surreal celebrity images, is now exhibiting a stunning collection of ten large-scale photographs ‘The Earth Laughs in Flowers’ in Dover Street, London. Bazaar speaks to the creator of these meticulous still lives about sexuality in springtime and why he’s now happier than ever before.

What was your inspiration for this collection?
I was inspired by a great love for Old Master paintings and still life - of vanitas - reminders that we’re here for a short time. The title [of the collection] comes from a line of a Waldo Emerson poem. It’s about the idea that man owns and feels control of the earth, lives on it, and then is buried in it. The earth gives back in flowers. Back when there were paintings and no television or radio, people would look at all these objects – which had symbolic meaning that told a narrative and stories - and that’s what I wanted to capture.

The dayʼs final presentation was eagerly awaited. David Lachapelle! Everyone was expecting slightly pretentious extravagance. We were going to show him, the King of Photoshop, what a “real” photo was. Every one was nicely surprised. Lachapelle was very much himself. Humble, funny, immensely cultivated, he shocked everyone! At the end of his interview, he showed us the making of his Pieta. When spectators realized there was NO photo manipulation involved, he triumphed!"

I was beginning to think the art crowd was slipping, losing something, maybe drying up. Hardly. The huge crowd that turned out for the opening night of David LaChapelle’s and Elaine Reichek’s show at 56, Bleecker Gallery wasn’t on bit dull, insipid or shriveled up. Everyone looked just the opposite: fluffy, ripe and in blossom. The place ablaze with personalized radical chic, but these weren’t hollow hipsters, these were people with actual substance inside their decorative shells. People were bandying their imaginations about and their art observations as well. No vapid spine-chilling trendies here, these were good-looking art-worlders. It struck me that here truly was the young avant-garde. So the crowd was here, and the art? That was here too.

In Earth Laughs In Flowers David LaChapelle appropriates the traditional Baroque still life painting in order to explore contemporary vanity, vice, the transience of earthly possessions and, ultimately, the fragility of humanity. Expectations of the still life are satisfied through the inclusion of symbolic objects such as fruit, flowers and skulls, but also upended by the insertion of everyday items such as cell phones, cigarette butts, balloons, Barbies, and a Starbuck’s iced coffee cup. This last effect is exacerbated by a tortuous disorderliness overwhelming the composition. The resulting photographs achieve a painterly, almost sculptural quality, thereby challenging the traditions of painting.

A protégé of Andy Warhol, the celebrated photographer David LaChapelle is internationally known for taking the pop-art sensibility to heights Warhol probably couldn't have imagined. Whether you consider his extravagant celebrity portraits, fashion shots and elaborate tableaux to be works of imaginative virtuoso or over-the-top kitsch, they can often be as compelling as a car crash - a recipe for success that Warhol knew very well.

Art DailyFirst fully representative retrospective of David LaChapelle's work at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague January 10, 2012

PRAGUE.- David LaChapelle (born 1963 in Farmington, Connecticut, USA) has ranked among the world’s most eminent photographers since the mid-1990s. His work has exerted an influence on dozens of other artists and over time, LaChapelle has evolved a style entirely his own, one which is recognizable at first glance. In the context of his exhibitions, the present show, entitled Thus Spoke LaChapelle and held at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague, occupies a unique place. It is the first fully representative retrospective of his work, as it includes also his early works from the mid-1980s. His early photographs are only shown rarely, and the Prague exhibition is the first to present them in the context of the artist’s oeuvre thus far. The exhibition presents an extensive selection of LaChapelle’s work, surveying all of the seminal phases of his creative career. Still, the emphasis is largely on work created in recent years, when LaChapelle all but retired from fashion and advertisement commissions in order to revisit his artistic premises and independent work. The present exhibition includes all major works from this stage of his career, including the monumental pieces The Deluge (2006) and The Raft of Illusion Raging Towards Truth (2011).

After bringing his two-decade career in magazines to a close (during which time he shot the faces and figures of Hollywood’s A-list and pop stars like Madonna and Michael Jackson) LaChapelle opted for a quieter life in Hawaii, in what he called “a whole new chapter in my life” — his return to gallery work.

“I've taken the techniques I've learned in 20 years of magazine work and now come full circle and applied it to gallery work,” LaChapelle said.

His surreal, highly sexual, sometimes grotesque and over-the-top portraits of the world’s most talked about stars, including Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton made LaChapelle a household name as a fashion and celebrity photographer. But throughout the press event, he expressed a desire to start over.

For a world famed artist, LaChapelle follows a rather simple and humble work philosophy. He finds that unconsciously — being in the right place at the right moment, inspiration just comes. “I feel like I’m wearing a conductor’s uniform but not actually driving the train,” he explained, “sometimes I don’t know where (the pictures) come from; I look at them and I get scared.” He stressed that his works are results of a collaboration effort, much like a jam session where everyone intuitively strives to hit the right harmony.

To call his work provocative is almost a cliche now, but the artist never sets out to shock or upset people. He called it a hollow motivation that produces shallow art. In the world where we see too much sadness and anxiety around us, LaChapelle’s goal is to create pictures that evoke completely opposite sentiments being true to himself.

LaChapelle’s signature hyper-realistic images with social messages has garnered him commission works from fashion and celebrity editorials. This exhibition will feature his recent artworks such as The Raft of Illusion, the site-specific installation Chain of Life and his most recent work, Gaia.

Burning Down the House, David Lachapelle's 1996 portrait of the fashion designer Alexander McQueen and his 'muse', style journalist Isabella Blow, at Hedingham Castle in Essex, has been purchased by the National Portrait Gallery.

BBC UKAlexander McQueen to be displayed in UK gallery October 14, 2011

A portrait of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen and magazine editor Isabella Blow has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). Burning Down The House by surrealist photographer David LaChapelle was originally published in Vanity Fair in 1997. The shot was with an article branding McQueen and Blow "The Provocateurs". NPG director Sandy Nairne said he was "delighted" to receive the work, which is now on display in the gallery.

The portrait was shot at Hedingham Castle in Essex in 1996 and shows McQueen dressed as a woman, brandishing a flaming torch. Both subjects were dressed in clothes designed by McQueen, while Blow was also wearing a Philip Treacy hat.

At the time of the shoot McQueen, who passed away last year, was just 27 years old and had recently debuted his first couture collection for the House of Givenchy. Blow, 38 at the time of the shoot, was largely credited with discovering McQueen.

A double portrait of the late Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow is now on show in the UK for the first time at the National Portrait Gallery. The picture, entitled Burning Down The House, was taken by David LaChapelle in December 1996 at Hedingham House in Essex, and first appeared in Vanity Fair.

"This is a fabulous fantasy image of an exceptionally creative pair - Alexander McQueen and Isabella Blow - taken by a great innovator in contemporary portraiture, David LaChapelle," said National Portrait Gallery director Sandy Nairne. "It has become an iconic image."

At the time the picture was taken, McQueen was just 27 years old and was still working at Givenchy. Both are wearing creations by the designer himself, with Blow sporting a Philip Treacy hat.

The image was bought by the National Portrait Gallery with the financial help of McQueen and Blow's long-term friend Daphne Guinness, The Marrakech Gallery Foundation and artist management company Fred Torres.

David LaChapelle began his successful career as a professional photographer for Interview magazine, the publication founded in 1969 by Andy Warhol who discovered LaChapelle. Prior to being scouted, he had been exhibiting his work in New York City galleries, following a stint studying at the North Carolina School of Arts. At Interview, LaChapelle began shooting the stars of the day, capturing on film some of the most famous faces of the times.

A lot of Christians might feel shocked when they first encounter the work of David LaChapelle. A renowned photographer and film-maker, LaChapelle is equally ranked among The Top Ten Most Important People in Photography in the World by American Photo as he is sometimes scornfully called the king of ‘kitsch’ or, bluntly, of ‘bad taste’ by his adversaries. The artist isn’t too proud to answer his critics:

“I use pop imagery – that’s my vocabulary; glamour and beauty is my vocabulary. They get angry when you use pop imagery (the things that are accessible) to talk about anything other than the completely superficial. And you know what? Let ‘em be angry … I’m into narrative and clarity. I’m not into obscurity. I’m not into people having to read and research – I’m just into the title, and the image, and the image being the language. If people don’t want to take ten seconds to look at a picture and put it together, I can’t help that, but I stand by it and I love it. And I will keep doing it. And I ain’t going away.” (Taken from an interview for Dazed and Confused, March 2010, by Anna Carnick).

One of the top international drawcards at this year’s Hong Kong Art Fair, surrealist photographers David LaChapelle discusses organic farming, giving up fashion for art and being censored in China.

For more than 20 years, beginning in 1984 when Andy Warhol asked him to shoot for Interview, David LaChapelle’s brand of candy-coloured, celebrity-flavoured photographic bombast littered the pages of popular magazines. If he wasn’t shooting models snorting diamonds like cocaine for Visionaire, he was photographing L’il Kim, her naked body stamped with Louis Vuitton logos for Rolling Stone, or, for Vanity Fair, he was taking pictures while a topless, 19-year-old Paris Hilton gave him the finger in her grandmother’s mansion. Addiction, consumption, fame: LaChapelle took contemporary America’s most lurid obsessions (or neuroses) and blew them up to ludicrous proportions, then recorded the results with the ambivalence of a madcap documentarian.

What exactly is beauty? It's impossible to define in any succinct way; beauty means different things to different people, cultures and eras. My friend and editor-in-chief of Vogue Australia, Kirstie Clements, is constantly pushing and redefining the notion of beauty. To me, it's Vogue's unofficial MO. Kirstie introduced me to the concept of "beautifully grotesque," a term coined in what has become one of my favourite coffee table tomes, Extreme Beauty in Vogue (Skira), which looks at some more challenging notions. It came to mind as I visited the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles last weekend to see the Beauty CULTure exhibit (catch it before November 27).

A typical month in the life of legendary photographer David LaChapelle is a lot like the one that started the morning after this visit -- involving a flight to say, Prague or Istanbul, thence to Hong Kong or Guadalajara, with a stop in Paris or Miami en route home to LA, along the way opening one or more hugely anticipated new exhibitions, and/or shooting a gorgeous and expensive fashion story, and/or accepting invitations to the most fabulous parties you can think of.

Time Out New YorkReview: David LaChapelle, “From Darkness to Light” July 12, 2011

At Lever House, LaChapelle comes full circle, with an installation that resurrects work addressing the AIDS crisis from his 1991 Liguori show, while mixing it with his current interest in contemporary allegories. Two large circular pieces, adhered directly to the lobby gallery’s windows, present hundreds of cutouts: tinted images of nude models, identified as Adam and Eve, metaphorically swimming under a giant microscope. Chain of Life links 14,000 torn-and-stapled photographs of nudes, shifting from shades of light to dark red, as hanging chains that traverse the room. Meanwhile, the massive collage The Raft fantastically riffs on Théodore Géricault’s 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa, which depicts struggling survivors of a shipwreck. Constructed by cutting, tearing and gluing staged photos together with found materials, The Raft—along with the other works in this crafty show—reveals LaChapelle at his creative best.

David LaChapelle is best known for his hyper-sexualized celebrity photographs of everyone from Naomi Campbell to Paris Hilton to David Beckham, and most recently, Lady Gaga. Sure enough, stars turned out for the opening of his latest exhibit, “From Darkness to Light”— Uma Thurman and Daphne Guinness among them.

But this show has none of those flashy, sexy portraits; instead, it involves taking the human body and re-imagining it in different forms. Specifically, in very childlike ways, via stickers, huge looped paper chains, and collages — like something you’d see in a kindergarten art class, but upon closer inspection, you’ll notice the pieces are crafted of nude photos.

The installation is playful, fun, and just a little bit naughty — and it brings a bit of downtown edginess to this otherwise bland corporate office space. Through Sept. 2, Lever House, 390 Park Avenue, lobby, Midtown.

Those who love the fusion of dance, song, and art will be thoroughly enchanted by Transcending Form a new dance work by choreographer John Byrne featuring the artwork of edgy photographer David LaChapelle.

Transcending Form’s eight dancers gracefully navigate the emotional journey of its story of life, afterlife, and the transcending soul to the eclectic, yet superbly appropriate, mix of music from Schubert to Shirley Brown, Michael Jackson, and, yes, even Elvis. Sprinkled throughout the theatrical journey are soulful live vocal performances by Gina Figueroa and the James Solomon Choir. The dance fable, which blends old form with new, is both energized and sensual. Its cast is as diverse as its East Village audience at Theatre 80 lending to its sincerity and appeal.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) ANJALI RAO, CNNI ANCHOR (voice-over): He's had Courtney Love pose as Mary Magdalene and pictured the late Michael Jackson as a martyr, visions that have helped David LaChapelle's catapult from struggling artist to world famous photographer. He's also injected his signature style into music videos directing them for artists such as Jennifer Lopez and Christina Aguilera although his flirtatious explorations of pop culture, fashion and religion haven't pleased everyone. Critics slammed his depiction of Kanye West as a black Jesus and he stirred up controversy with his Lolita-like take on a young Britney Spears. That didn't stop this prodigy of Andy Warhol shine away from a challenge. In 2002, LaChapelle's talked photographed the video and financed his own documentary about the dance craze cramping in South Central Los Angeles. This week on TALK ASIA, we catch up with David LaChapelle and his latest exhibition in Hongkong and find out why he ditched the glitch and glamour of fashion photography to return to his autistic roots. (END VIDEOTAPE)

The New York TimesTHE NEW YORK TIMES: TALKING DANCE AND ART WITH DAVID LACHAPELLE AND JOHN BYRNE June 29, 2011

‘Talking Dance and Art With David LaChapelle and David Byrne'
By Julie Bloom

John Byrne and David LaChapelle used to be a couple. The romance didn’t last, but the two have continued their relationship through art. Mr. Byrne, a choreographer and former dancer for Paul Taylor, worked on “Rize,” Mr. LaChapelle’s 2005 documentary about krumping, as well as “Elton John: The Red Piano.” Now Mr. LaChapelle has produced Mr. Byrne’s first full-length work of dance, “Transcending Form,” with Fred Torres, at Theater 80 every Wednesday through Aug. 24. In addition, Mr. Byrne has created a structured improvisation piece at Lever House, home to an exhibit of Mr. LaChapelle’s work, “From Darkness To Light.” Pedestrians can happen across this performance every Wednesday from 1 to 2 p.m. We talked to Mr. Byrne and Mr. LaChapelle about their new works, their collaboration and the melding of dance and art.

CNNDavid LaChapelle: 'I wanted to create work specifically for China' June 10th, 2011

“I wanted to do some work specifically for China and inspired by it, kind of like China seen through Western eyes,” says Lachapelle, who has recently won a new generation of admirers in Asia. He considers Lee a particularly potent symbol, given the way he transcended cultural barriers to become an international star.

Mr. LaChapelle’s presence in New York reflects another tie with the pop art pioneer: An attempt to transition from commercial success to greater recognition in the art world. Over the last 25 years, Mr. LaChapelle has become renowned for glossy, sexed-up magazine portraits of stars from Brooke Shields to Lady Gaga. Now, his art shows are selling out and he recently opened an installation at New York’s Lever House, his largest exhibition to date.

The glass-walled lobby of Midtown’s Lever House on Thursday night allowed the post-work crowd a clear view of the sort of human tornado of glitter and color that was the opening of David LaChapelle’s installation, “From Darkness into Light.” The exhibit presents the photographer’s work in three different media: stickers, collage, and looped paper chains in the style of a 1950s prom.

David LaChapelle was the High Priest of celebrity photography for almost two decades. So why has he turned his back on fame and fashion to explore death, disaster and the end of times?

If you show anyone interested in photography a picture of your work, they will immediately say ‘LaChapelle’. Why are you so distinctive?

Because I didn’t think about it too much. I went intuitively. I blew up colour at the same time grunge took over; all this black and white, people looking depressed, whereas I just exploded with colour. I loved grunge, but I just wanted to be different.

Sometimes I wanted to be funny and put celebrities in strange situations; other times there was something inside my head that I wanted to put in my work.
You only show in galleries now. The Raft is currently exhibiting in Hong Kong, but is there a direct link between this and your earlier work, Deluge? Yes, The Raft is chapter two in the narrative. It’s an idea from Deluge, the apocalypse of the future, but only in a metaphorical sense, a sort of feeling of the end, that we’re all going to suffer.

HONG KONG — It’s no surprise that Hong Kong’s art fair has taken another bound forward, given its quick growth since it began in 2008. But the rising number of galleries taking part — now at 260 — is not the only reason that 2011 is turning out to be a watershed year.
Internationally, the owners of Art Basel are now majority stakeholders in the Hong Kong event, it was announced at the start of May, a turn that promises to give the fair more prominence.
Locally, ART HK, which opened to the public on Thursday, has spread beyond the confines of the exhibition and convention center. The large number of outside events has created for a first time what feels like a real citywide art week.

DAVID LACHAPELLE, known internationally for his acerbic wit and lysergic imagery, talks to MATHEW SCOTT about his career from the Village to Vogue and beyond.

THE CROWD INSIDE the cavernous exhibition hall has been gathering its anticipation for more than half an hour when David LaChapelle appears behind the sound deck, stage right, and begins chatting with the volunteers working at Art Stage Singapore 2011.

HANNOVER.
In the first institutional solo exhibition in Germany of works by the American photographer David LaChapelle (*1964), the kestnergesellschaft presents a series of new, not yet shown photographs. The series Earth Laughs in Flowers, which was created this year, refers to art-historical visual traditions but never loses sight of LaChapelle’s own artistic language.

As a DJ played “Xanadu” at the exclusive Ku de ta Club on the 57th floor of Skypark, art collectors from Indonesia, China, Singapore, America, Switzerland and France met to toast Asia’s newest art fair, Art Stage Singapore, being held in the continent’s smallest country (12-16 January). “We as a collectors are doing the job that are governments should be doing—supporting artists, building museums and supporting art fairs,” said Indonesian collector Oei Hong Djien.

He believes that his mission to show beauty in everyone can sometimes be thwarted when celebrities turn out to be unpleasant. Lately, though, he says he has found a mental trick in the pages of a book written by a former prostitute. She was asked how she made herself have sex with physically repulsive people and her technique was to look for the one nice thing about them, even if it was their shoes, he says.

Art DailyPaul Kasmin Gallery Opens New Space in Istanbul with Exhibition by David LaChapelle December 14, 2010

The Photographer of the Illusion.
Reinterpreting his fashion and commercial works as well as the popular culture, the American artist David LaChapelle is being defined as the naughty boy and illusionist of photography after Newton. He is creating identity out of objects and object out of identities.

What is more, LaChapelle is famous for creating portraits of celebrities with the themes; fear, death, existence and belief. Since 1995 he has been awarded several times as the best photography artist of the year and his exhibitions have been held in many countries, from New York to Berlin, from China to France.

Who’s the bigger freak, Michael Jackson or David LaChapelle? The late Jackson was clearly the king, but all he had to work with was his own wacky self. LaChapelle, by contrast, commands an Olympian cast of characters, often in outlandishly erotic costume (or no costume at all), disporting on blazing sets that marry Bollywood and the Bible with a bit of the Parthenon thrown in for good measure.

From Martin Scorsese to Peter Doing, film-makers, photographers and artists explain how Caravaggio's prophetically cinematic paintings inspired them. David LaChapelle – Photographer and film director Caravaggio is often called the most modern of the old masters – there's a newness, a contemporary feel to his work that painting prior to him just didn't have. It's like when [fashion designer Alexander] McQueen came on the scene, everything else [in the fashion world] suddenly looked old.

David LaChapelle’s new show called American Jesus at Paul Kasmin Gallery, includes his last photo shoot with his good friend Michael Jackson just before his death. Jackson is represented in different photos as a biblical martyr.

The Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea happens to reside next door to the nightclub Marquee. This meant the opening of photographer David LaChapelle's show "American Jesus" Tuesday coincided with the launch party for the soundtrack to MTV's "Jersey Shore." You wouldn't be faulted for having trouble telling the difference. Was that Snookie or just a drag queen dressed like Snookie? Was that Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino or just another one of Mr. LaChapelle's abtastic friends? Does it matter? Of course not. Just like on the Jersey Shore, in Mr. LaChapelle's universe, pretty much anything goes.

The 47-year-old LaChapelle spoke passionately the other day about growing up gay, Catholic and suicidal in Fairfield, Conn., and finding salvation (and photography) at the North Carolina School for the Arts. Twice he burst into tears recounting the trials of the King of Pop, whose first name he has tattooed on a ring finger. Although they hadn't met, the two had mutual friends. "He knew I was on his side," says LaChapelle, who staged these shots at his farm in Maui.

Photographer David LaChapelle’s newest exhibit, “American Jesus,” depicts the late pop singer Michael Jackson in a series of photos as, well, Jesus.

LaChappelle and Jackson were good friends, and completed a photo shoot shortly before the singer’s death (although it’s likely that a stand-in or two also was involved in putting together these shots).

This spring, the focus is on the Italian Renaissance. Three quite exceptional exhibitions offer the visitor a textbook analysis of a period that is so often appealed to but still uniformly misunderstood. For anyone who has paused for a moment in front of The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi and listened to the well-intentioned petty ignorances trotted out by guides for un­suspecting and uninterested tourists on 50 (or 500) dollars a day, this comes as relief for which much thanks.

The photographer David LaChapelle appeared to be something of an anomaly among the suited art folk and trendy hangers-on who packed the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei’s (MOCA, Taipei) Yamaguchi Room when he opened his eponymously titled show of 250 works there last month. Dressed in a hooded navy sweat top and dark jeans, he looked more like a street punk than one of America’s top fashion and art photographers of flashy and flamboyant set images.

London Evening StandardIs David LaChapelle the 21st century's Andy Warhol? May 5, 2010

Oh, to live the life of David LaChapelle. Ever since he ran away from his strict upbringing in Connecticut at 14 to live it hard and fast in New York with Andy Warhol and the Studio 54 set, it's been a rollercoaster ride of gay sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. He's shot more than 150 covers for Rolling Stone magazine and worked with almost every celebrity misfit and music icon that popular culture has given us. Stories of his epic partying, not to mention his stint as a rent boy and his three mental-institution sojourns, only add to the legend. This new exhibition, a collection of satirical photographic tableaux centered on religion, corruption and exploitation, consolidates the more message-driven and artistic direction his work is taking.

David LaChapelle, the commercial photographer and pop video maker, wants to get away from the kitsch jokiness that made his reputation, and move on to something more socially aware. And, buoyed by sales of his prints at auction and good showings at art fairs in recent years, he wants to expand away from advertising and editorial work into the world called art. This London exhibition is one of the first based on this new ambition.

Over a 20-year career, David LaChapelle has carved a name for himself as an enfant terrible of pop culture photography. The cutting, acerbic wit and layered symbolism in his celebrity portraiture, fashion and advertising images is seen as a bolt of honesty—albeit a glamourised and high-gloss one—in an industry known for its false vision of reality.

Photographer David LaChapelle's take on Botticelli's Venus and Mars is enlarged into a mural located in the courtyard of the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. It is one of the many public installations that will be on display during the Scotiabank Contact Festival that opens on Saturday.

London Times Saturday ReviewExposed: The Man Who Shot Fame April 24, 2010

Making his critically acclaimed, charged urban dance documentary Rize in 2006 was a turning point, as was turning down directing Madonna’s 2005 Hung Up video. “She’s really hard to work for. I didn’t want to be yelled at. She wanted to film a subway scene with people running out. It was just after a subway bombing and I was worried it might be insensitive, but apparently she doesn’t read newspapers. We haven’t spoken since. But I don’t want to direct Hollywood films. I was offered Juno but turned it down.”

Independent UKOut of Africa: David LaChapelle's Strange Visions of a Continent April 23, 2010

Of the artists and photographers working today, they don't come more in your face, more unapologetically trashy, more instantly recognisable than David LaChapelle. The self-anointed "Fellini of photography" is known as a bold recorder of our times, an artist who fuses the perceived glamour of contemporary celebrity with the physicality and complex compositions of the Italian Renaissance artists. Full of sly humour, his photographs both celebrate and subvert the notion of fame. With their staged artificiality and surrealist flourishes, some teeter in the brink of tastelessness while others deliberately turn your stomach.

The latest work by David LaChapelle, the superstar godfather of high-camp portraiture, is a serious artistic take on global politics.

Of all the glittery images in the celebrity pantheon, photographer David LaChapelle's have long been the best examples of over-the-top kinky glam. In the past two decades, he's snapped everyone who is anyone in luxuriantly lurid and deliciously rude set-ups where clothes seem to fall as the colors are turned up.

In 2006, LaChapelle made a dramatic break from the fashion and celebrity scenes, moving to Maui where he renovated a former nudist colony compound, turning it into his private sanctuary. Here he has pursued his fine art work, despite doubts that that arena would accept someone with his background. Now, drawing on a broad base that ranges from art history to street culture, LaChapelle’s new work is turning many a stiff-necked critic’s head, focusing the lens of celebrity and fashion on consumerism and cultural hierarchies.

As influences, I draw on all great artists, from Michelangelo to Michael Jackson. In a recent photograph I depicted Jackson as an angel because he was a modern-day martyr. An innocent artist persecuted in a televised, modern-day witch hunt. The first advertisement that made an impression on me was "Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is:' [Alka-Seltzer]. I got into advertising because I was really trying to be independent and it was a step. Showing in galleries didn't pay my bills at the time. I don't feel that working on an advertising campaign compromises my art. On the contrary, it can be so invigorating and energizing for myself and my studio; a good ad job is exciting.

Few photographers have captured fashion and celebrity with as much airbrushed
excess as David LaChapelle. His over-the-top portraits—spanning Pamela
Anderson, Amanda Lepore and Madonna to Alexander McQueen, Isabella Blow
and Elton John—are icons of 1980s and ‘90s decadence. So when we met up
with the American photographer in Beijing, where he was preparing for an
exhibition of his work at the Today Art Museum (June 2010), we expected
someone a bit flashy and, well, frivolous. Instead, we got deferential and, well,
down-to-earth. Maui, to be exact...

“I saw how they treated Andy at the end of his life. People were awful to him, they hounded him to death. He was huge in Europe and Asia, sure, but at home…” legendary photographer and one-man personality cult David LaChapelle is rarely at a loss for words. He thinks out loud, incapable of or uninterested in keeping secrets: guilelessly an with unnerving generosity picking up the threads of his life story where he left off, as though he were always already your lifelong friends. We met to talk about the newly released Michael Jackson picture, the first of a trilogy, but we were talking about Andy Warhol. “Critics ignoring him, calling his collaboration with Basquiat a disaster. I saw him actually painting in those days, taking up a brush, painting The Last Supper. Around then, Peter Brandt tried to donate a 20-foot Mao to the Modern and they rejected it because they had “no room” can you imagine! Then Andy died and two years later the MoMA has this retrospective; it was the first time they’d ever given over the entire building, every gallery on every floor it seemed like, to a single artist. They had plenty of room then, didn’t they?"

"I wanted to get over the collective fear that's instilled in us by the apocalyptic times that we live in," LaChapelle says. ''If the end is coming, if it's inevitable, let's at least go out as enlightened as possible. In the picture of Las Vegas [Sin City], people know that time is out and death is imminent, but they are all helping each other. Their animal instincts aren't coming forward, there's empathy and love."

The Irish TimesArtist looks to Dark Ages and famous faces September 18, 2009

It could be a metaphor for our times and a symbol of hope, or it might seem like blasphemous pornography. Some may wonder whether it's pop culture or high art, and many will go through David LaChapelle's exhibition, which opened in Dublin last night, picking out the famous faces appearing in scenes that seem to have sprung from Renaissance paintings by way of Vogue.
The centre piece is Deluge, a reworking of a section of Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling, but in LaChapelle's version it's a modern day cataclysm visited on the Gomorrah that is Las Vegas.

Subtlety isn’t a quality one expects in the work of David LaChapelle, and it’s not one you’ll find in even the title of “The Rape of Africa,” the monumental photographic tableau that is the centerpiece of his show at David Desanctis Gallery.
A compositionally faithful adaptation of Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars,” the work presents a bare-breasted Naomi Campbell in the role of Venus, a white male model who looks to have stumbled out of a Caravaggio painting (or at least a movie about a Caravaggio painting) as Mars, and three young black boys wielding serious artillery in the place of the fawns.
Gold spills out around the reclining Mars (as well as, hilariously, a battered replica of Damien Hirst’s infamous diamond-coated skull), while tractors claw at a barren landscape — presumably a gold mine — visible beyond.
All this in an electrified palette of gold, scarlet, hot pink and turquoise.

David LaChapelle’s bedroom is surrounded by kava, a tranquilizing plant that some say can fight insomnia and inspire vivid dreams. Despite that, the 46-year-old photographer said he couldn’t sleep one recent night, giddy about an upcoming seven-day shoot here. “I always used to pray for a cabin in the woods with vegetarian food and a place to make my art,” said Mr. LaChapelle, his trucker hat twisted sideways as he reached into a gallon-sized jar of honeycomb, harvested from a nearby beehive.

Burnt out after two decades in the world of fashion photography, where he became famous for his surreal portraits of pop stars like Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears, the Warhol disciple called it quits, left his homes in New York and Los Angeles and purchased an 18-acre former nudist colony here on the Wainapanapa coast, a woodsy piece of land overgrown with bramble and teeming with mosquitoes. He spent much of his first three rainy months staring up at the sky in the Italian marble bathtub he had installed outside his cabin, nestled in a jungle of ferns, dragon-fruit plants and night-blooming jasmine.

In the main room stands a fantastical pop-up mural showing LaChapelle's own version of apocalypse: consumers laid out nude and clearly in anguish, exotic luxury products and humping golden pigs. Walking us through the exhibition, Lachapelle describes the new work, Decadence: The insufficiency of All Things Attainable (2008), as "anti-commodity art". He nods towards another series, The Crash (2008), four supersized photographs, each printed on mounted cardboard. They display damaged American cars stacked on top of each other, each with a similar title: Enhanced Performance; Intelligent Decadence; Boundless Freedom; Luxurious Power. His latest work, he says, is "inspired by the idea of negative money. I'm taking this as a chance and an opportunity to say something."

"My pictures tend to polarize people, as some think it is commercial. But one of my points is that the world of commerce and art have become intertwined at this moment in time—so the subject matter I am dealing with is just the reality of now.
I want to communicate and impact people. In the distracted world we live in, I want to grab people’s attention and hold it, in order to tell them a story in the same way that people’s attention is grabbed by video games, billboards and magazines. But, with my work, there are details and subliminal messages that you would not find in those places. My newer work is much more layered."

LaChapelle spent two decades recording pop culture, mirroring it back to itself before flipping the genre on its head and taking a shot from that angle. He was one of the most coveted editorial photographers, working constantly for the likes of Vogue, GQ, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone. He couldn’t get enough, always with a camera in his hand, always working, working, working, wanting to take a shot of everyone, everyone, anyone who mattered. He wanted those shots to be the definition of the subject’s life, of their celebrity, to capture the glamour in a way that no other photo could, so that in decades, in centuries, someone studying this time period could look at that one photo and know who that person was.

Village VoiceBones's Beat: David LaChapelle Wages War at Tony Shafrazi September 25, 2008

The show is David LaChapelle's. LaChapelle is a photographer and filmmaker and also, an artist I suppose, whose meat and potatoes is American celebrity. He favors props, fantasy, and eye-popping saturation. He likes punchily outlining figures and making them prop forward in the landscape in a way that oddly recalls the Orientalist in Manet. He doesn't fear controversy or taboo (he shot the musician Kanye West in a crown of thorns for the cover of Rolling Stone magazine two years ago, and that image has been recast here, 102 inches tall).

The New York BladeOpen the Floodgates: Photographer David LaChapelle charts a new course April 20, 2007

LaChapelle’s most recent photos from 2007 provide a contrast, as they were created not for advertising campaigns, but in the province of fine art, and they have as their theme a great flood.
His central work is an enormous digital photograph (about 6 feet tall and 23 feet long) titled “Deluge” which was inspired by Michelangelo’s painting of the same name depicting the biblical Flood that is displayed on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Like the Renaissance master’s work, LaChapelle’s depicts several dozen people-all nude, and of a variety of ages and body types-helping each other survive their climate-driven catastrophe.

With the publication of Heaven to Hell – the third book of a trilogy – and his recent move to Hawaii, LaChapelle has now announced a clean break with his past. Refusing to work any longer within the commercial framework of celebrity and fashion photography, he intends to focus on personal work and gallery exhibitions instead, beginning with several current and upcoming shows in Berlin, New York, Buenos Aires and Milan. At 38, David LaChapelle is just at the beginning of a new career.

You can spot a David LaChapelle photograph at 20 paces: the saturated Pop Art colour, the set-piece, minutelystyled imagery, the warped sense of humour. They look like the product of a deranged, albeit incredibly talented, child let loose with some tins of paint and a load of top-shelf magazines.

The latest example of his extraordinary imagination is a book, Heaven to Hell, a successor to Artist & Prostitutes. ("Prostitutes go to heaven," says LaChapelle. "It's their clients who go to hell").

Over the past two decades, the former East Village club-kid-turned-photographer-turned-director has done just that. Legendary for his Technicolor Wizard of Oz-meets-Fellini photographic transmogrifications of pop idols from Pamela Anderson to Tupac Shakur, LaChapelle has naturally segued into big-budget music videos over the past few years. Along the way, he became a multimedia sensation, jetting around the world, garnering accolades for his videos with artists such as Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Moby.

A long-time friend, Anderson has proved a perfect subject for LaChapelle's sexy-twisted portraits that take their inspiration from Truman Capote's dictum that "good taste is the enemy of art”. The interview was moderated by blogger and radio host Kate Sullivan, who e-mailed BB the morning after to say:"I hope those two are feeling no pain but I have to say, in ten years and hundreds of interviews, that was by far the weirdest interview experience I've had....I know you want this to really be a conversation between them, but I didn't quite work out that neatly".

While the Declare Yourself campaign ventures far into the territory of hipdom, using not just celebrity performers in its ads but David LaChapelle, the fashion photographer, to shoot and direct them, its creators said they were not trying to play the cool card.
"Cool was never an adjective on the table," Mr. LaChapelle said. "What's different about this campaign than just Madonna voguing in a flag is that this is really hard hitting: it's going to be scary if you don't use your voice."

The video, directed by the fashion photographer David LaChapelle, was clearly supposed to stir up controversy and add another chapter to the continuing Britney-vs.-Justin Timberlake narrative. (Mr. Dorff may not look exactly like Mr. Timberlake, but the demeanor, and certainly the tumult, are familiar.) While the video plays on the audience’s knowledge of that troubled union, it hardly qualifies as ex-boyfriend bashing.

In the main gallery, Elton John is sharing a joke with a generically modified Pete Burns and a GM-free Sam Taylor Wood. On the dance-floor, two brickshithouse gogo-boys in their Calvin’s are warding off potential dance rivals. In the toilet a boy is crying quietly under the sink. And in the, ahem, backroom a young lady is licking – licking – a wipe clean picture of David Beckham in denim cut-offs… It’s the launch night for David LaChapelle’s i-D sponsored London retrospective and things are going pretty much as expected.

The brainchild of LaChapelle, Elton's new video is a kind of flipside to last year's "This Train Don't Stop There Anymore", in which Justin Timberlake, as the young Elton, circa 1976, moves in slow motion through celebrity strewn backstage corridors, his lips in sync with Elton's voice. "It's what a superstar goes through to get from the dressing-room to the stage," explains LaChapelle.

Always elaborate with his set design, for Style, LaChapelle hired an army of extras and special-effects artists to re-create different death scenes. An accident victim passes away in the back of an ambulance and a terminally ill patient finally loses the battle for life. Rising serenely above the chaos of watch death scene is the soul ascending, depicted as a beautiful woman clad in white. “I don’t think of heaven as fluffy white clouds, it’s just a way that we could understand it, showing white light, idealistic beauty and diaphanous dresses. But, ultimately I’m trying to photograph something that is unphotographable, yet is has its own vocabulary,” explains LaChapelle.

A LaChapelle photo shoot is a production, and so, apparently, is a LaChapelle life.
His entire crew, including Kristen Vallow, his set designer, his studio manager, agent, favorite art directors, wranglers, muses -- their friends and relatives -- have all assembled at one of the chateau's most remote and desirable Modernist cottages to hang out, talk, smoke, talk some more, get made up, run around, carry things, talk and fuss over the makeup artist Sharon Gault's baby, nicknamed Peanut. Amanda Lepore, whose flawless transformation from male to female is almost incidental to her voluptuous lips, is here from New York, along with Princess Zoraya (Armen Ra), who is learning to play the theremin. The actor Tobias Maendel is lounging around in blue jeans and aviator glasses, looking like a mid-70's hustler. Lili Haydn, a violinist-singer who appeared onstage with the P-Funk All-Stars at Woodstock II, is tuning up. Amy Dinkins, an opera singer, is running scales. The landscape designers Andrew Cao and Stephen Jerrom are pouring ground and tumbled shards of colored glass to make glittering walkways in the yard. Eric and his assistants are putting the final touches on the fake-real food. And Drea De Matteo, an actor from "The Sopranos," is holding court on one of the lawn settees, looking like a cross between a biker chick and a young Farrah Fawcett.

American Photo on CampusTHE UPSIDE-DOWN WORLD OF PHOTOGRAPHY'S HOTTEST IMAGEMAKER February 2000

"Being in a photograph is a performance. For an actor or a rock star, it's just an extension of entertaining. The really smart entertainers know how important it is to get still images out there. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, even the reclusive Marlon Brando knew the importance of leaving the world with stills of themselves. Some young actors today don't get it; they think it's not cool to be photographed. But it is. The photograph is tangible, a frozen moment of time."

A significant part of LaChapelle’s last decade has been spent living out of a suitcase in various glam hotels around the world, and it is this lifestyle that gave rise to the title of his new collection. “I’ve gotten so used to living in them that I’ve made my apartment look like one so that I won’t feel away from home when I actually am home,” he writes in the afterword to the new volume. “But more than that,” he tells me, “I view this book as a collection of people that make up the time we live in. It’s really about America today.”

"I always want my subjects to be beautiful, bigger-than-Iife icons. Movie stars, you know? But we're in a different world now, and that world's not so pretty. So with anybody I shoot I think about what they've done. And look at the life Pam Anderson leads: It's crazy and scandalous and, just like you can't take your eyes off a car wreck, you can't take your eyes off her. So, in the picture, maybe she got hit by a car and her wig fell off, but, hey, her body's slammin' and her face looks gorgeous. It's a beautiful car wreck".

During the early 1980's, when David LaChapelle was working as a busboy at Studio 54, he used to sneak into openings at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in SoHo to see his idols: Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat. On June 4, Mr. LaChapelle, who is one of the most successful photographers in the world, had his dream come true when the first show of his work opened at the Shafrazi Gallery on Wooster Street.
[...]"How it happened is pretty amazing," said Mr. LaChapelle. "We were shooting Naomi Campbell for Playboy and she called up Tony and said, if you want to see me naked come over now, and he came over and we just started talking about pictures and the reasons I do them and stuff".

Looking beyond these obvious characteristics, LaChapelle is able to demonstrate an uncanny narrative ability with the economy of a devastating quip. "Nuns and Maids" exemplifies the leveling field exerted by an earthquake, a natural catastrophe that inevitably reduces even the most sophisticated culture to a rubble and in effect erases all distinctions between upper and lower classes, whereby everyone is truly homeless, glamour or no glamour.

As Amanda’s mentor, photographer David LaChapelle, explains it, “She has no interest in being a girl. She wants to be a drawing of a girl, a cartoon like Jessica Rabbit. When I told her that silicone is dangerous, she said, ‘I don’t care, as long as I look beautiful in the coffin.’ There’s something kind of profound in that, that she’s creating this moment of beauty for herself and is willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.”

LaChapelle’s Fellini-like images have appeared in such magazines as Rolling Stone, Interview, Vanity Fair, and French Vogue as well as in his 1996 debut book, LaChapelle Land. With Hotel LaChapelle, the photographer checks the eyes of the beholder into a room with an unearthly view

Because of the conceptual, storytelling nature of his work, you might expect that the next step in LaChapelle’s career would be for him to direct a film. In fact, the photographer has been working on developing a film for several years. To whet his appetite, LaChapelle has directed a video for the rock group the Dandy Warhols, a short film for Giorgio Armani, and a Citibank commercial featuring Elton John, each one an intensely colorful, bizarrely off-kilter visual feast. “But photography is my first love,” he says.

Is there a difference between his editorial work (for Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and Details, among others) and his equally varied advertising oeuvre? “Editorial is a laboratory. That’s where I do all my experimenting,” LaChapelle explains. “With advertising you’re dealing with big corporations, and they can’t afford to let someone experiment on their tab.” But he readily admits that the end result usually turns out entirely different from the sketch originally presented to him. No matter; there seem to be very few complaints. When Weiss Whitten Stagliano came to him with the idea for the “Boot Licker” shot in the Bass Ale campaign, they suggested black leather. But he felt the whole picture would turn out ugly. “I thought it would look beautiful to see the orange balanced against blue. The blue vinyl is much prettier than black leather and not so cliché.”

LaChapelle's elaborate productions are often described as "little movie sets", so it's no surprise the photographer has, in the past few years, made the transition from print to directing commercials and music videos. He made his live-action debut in 1995 with a promo for MTV's Raw, a hilarious send up of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane. "Commercial work is challenging" says LaChapelle, who directs through Venus/HSI in New York. "I'm good at telling a story. Each photograph tells a story. It's chance for my pictures to walk and talk".

In 1992, frustrated after an album-cover shoot with Keith Richards, David LaChapelle decided to transform celebrity portraiture into a personal crusade. In the process, he turned his career around and changed the look of commercial photography.

"I like to see outrageousness and sexiness and things that are out of control," he says. His high-concept pop-cultural references (the Beastie Boys as sloppy workers at a fast-food Joint) and lusciously candy-colored sexuality (Drew Barrymore as a nipple-flashing waitress) struck a chord with a modern audience looking for visual pizazz. Today they're instantly recognizable.

The New York TimesHelmut Newton's New Book, With Its Own Coffee Table November 16, 1999

"He isn't very impressed by current photography. ‘There's a lot of pornographic pictures taken by the young today,’... He frowned. ‘A lot of the nudity is just gratuitous. But someone who makes me laugh is David LaChapelle. I think he's very bright, very funny, and good.’”

When given a portrait assignment (he regularly shoots for Detour, Interview and Vanity Fair), LaChapelle considers the subject carefully: “I never want to take the same picture twice. With stars I think how I can photograph them in a way that somehow celebrates who they are.” Beauty is essential, and LaChapelle freely admits he uses computer technology to enhance his subjects, minimizing their faults and transporting them to otherworldly settings: “I want everyone I photograph to look like movie and rock stars. I’m not into exposing their flaws of wrinkles or pimples. I am totally into making them look amazing. I was photographing Stevie Nicks a few years back when she was heavy. I sat her down and said, ‘It doesn’t matter because I’m going to make you look great.’"

"I’m deeply interested in the way people are altering their faces and bodies, he explains. “After a certain amount of plastic surgery, people begin to look neither young nor old, and this is the first time in history that people have had this exploring the possibilities of where plastic surgery might be going. In a strange way, I find them beautiful. Sometimes, for me, beauty is simply something I haven’t seen before.”

LaChapelle’s first work appeared in magazines-and if you scan the pages of his book, LaChapelle Land, you’ll be reminded of the images that helped make Details, The Face and French Vogue worth buying over the years. But the 34-year-old LaChapelle has recently expanded his vision through commercials, music videos and Salvation Armani, a short film for Giorgio Armani, starring Jennifer Tilly.

LaChapelle’s reached a place where he can afford to rock the boat of the entertainment industry lemmings. Yet, at the same time, David genuinely remembers the long, hard road from his first quasi-glamour gig as a Studio 54 busboy to a do-no-wrong publishing darling. In 1978, a fifteen-year-old LaChapelle had pulled chocks à la Keith Haring, packed his shit, and left his family digs in a North Carolina apartment complex to make a break for the Big City. By his own admission, he was a pot-smoking disaster, day-dreaming about supporting himself as a painter or illustrator

"Recently, I saw an anchorwoman on TV with bleached-out fuzz, obvious cosmetic surgery and capped teeth make a condescending remark about fashion being trite and superficial after a segment about the Paris shows. Artistry, craftsmanship, beauty and entertainment are important in all cultures, any National Geographic will attest to that. Fashion encompasses all of these things. Is it more profound to be an investment banker? How twisted that we consider an accumulation of money somehow meaningful. I find people whose existence is monetarily centered, whose goals and focus are on getting rich, loathsome and banal. I’d rather spend my time with people who are obsessed with creation and beauty-they laugh more."

The most famous photo in LaChapelle Land is also the most homo-friendly: the much-talked-about Diesel jeans ad depicting a passionate V-J Day kiss between two hot and hunky sailors, portrayed by former gay power couple Bob and Rod Jackson-Paris. "That's one of the things I'm most proud of," says LaChapelle, talking about the shot, which he says he intended as a kind of fashionably correct commentary on the ongoing controversy about gays in the military. "Diesel ran that ad in 67 countries around the world," he marvels, "and I've met so many gay people-from k.d. lang to a bartender at a gay bar in Orlando-who told me that they ripped that photo out of a magazine and put it on the wall. I would have loved to have seen an image like that when I was 15-it would have meant a lot to me."

In the glitzily decorated room -festooned with streamers, balloons, wedding cakes, and ice sculptures- the beautiful people ran rampant in masks and mascaras. LaChapelle, done up like a space-age Donny Osmond, radiated the sweet smell of success. The music was 70s, the entertainment -break dancing! - was '80s, but the mood was up-to-the-minute '90s, and you must believe me on that.

Playful and slightly perverse, LaChapelle pushes his celebrity subjects into caricaturing their carefully tended images. The results range from stunning to grotesque. Tori Spelling-made up to look like a cross between a prostitute and a prom queen-was so distraught during her shoot that she ran to the bathroom in tears. But somehow, LaChapelle-a grown man who embraces his inner club kid-gets his subjects to play along. “I don’t do nudity, usually,” says actress Jennifer Tilly, “but you feel trust with David. Before I knew it, I had nothing on and was holding these tiny fans on my private parts.”

David Duchovny, Drew Barrymore, Tupac, Sandra Bullock and Coolio are just a few of the celebs to have been given the magician's makeover - for true surreal appeal, get your paws round a copy and brighten up that bookshelf. The same effect as drinking half a bottle of tequila, but without the hangover.

"As a kid I was dead-set on becoming a painter or an illustrator. Then I went to an art high school in North Carolina and that's when I first started taking pictures. My first roll of film was of my friends completely naked in my dorm room! And I knew that was it, I was completely sold and I can't remember ever finishing a drawing after that."

Anyone who follows contemporary photography cannot not know who David LaChapelle is. His career as a photographer began while attending an arts high school in North Carolina. Switching over from drawing to photography as his medium proved “a faster way to say what I wanted to say.” His first roll of film captured nude portraits of his classmates, young dancers and sculptors. It seems appropriate that this genesis has evolved into the current work; a host of angels, saints, mythical and allegorical figures.

Though he's one of the hottest photographers working in fashion and advertising today, you couldn't call him an overnight sensation. He's been working since the mid-1980's (in 1987, American Photographer chose the then unknown LaChapelle as one of its promising "New Faces"), but in the past year his career has gone ballistic. He's under contract with Details magazine. His superlative campaign for Diesel jeans has set the ad industry on its ear. And he's negotiating with publishers to do a book within the next year.

Art directors and editors who have worked with Mr. LaChapelle share one comment about the work they received at the end of epic productions: it is always something they haven't seen before.

"He's very much a creator rather than just an observer," said Donald Schneider, the art director of French Vogue. "It's driven by the desire to look into the next millennium: building sets and manipulating the photos on the computer. Everybody is fed up with retro, and the good young photographers want to explore the future and come up with new things. He is the one farthest ahead already."